Hide Me Among the Graves

Crawford looked in that direction and saw what at first appeared to be a wet cloth kite hanging from an old iron bracket high up on a brick wall, and a moment later he realized that it was a large crucifix draped in clinging linen.

In the street at the foot of the old lightless house was another of the canvas-blocked holes.

Johanna tilted back her umbrella and looked through narrowed eyes at Christina. “You and I should flip a coin,” she said. “Both of us need to hide from him.”

Christina raised her shoulders in a shiver, and McKee said, “No, a reflection of Sister Christina attached to her wouldn’t accomplish anything.”

“But it was a generous thought,” said Christina.

McKee crouched and again wiggled a post beside this canvas cover, and this time, since they were farther away from the street-ball game — ominous in memory now, with its arcane patterns — Crawford heard a bell clang somewhere below the canvas.

Grimy fingers poked up from under the canvas, and a moment later it had been pulled aside to reveal a lean, bone-pale face and magnified eyes blinking behind two pairs of spectacles, one jammed in front of the other.

“You be wantin’ to hide from God?”

“A god,” said McKee. “We brought our own Eucharist.”

The face bobbed. “There’s still a corkage fee.”

The man tucked the cover aside and scuffed back down a ladder, out of sight.

Crawford shrugged out of his frock coat and laid it in the mud beside the square hole, then knelt on it and felt around with his boots for the top rung of the ladder; when he found it, he grinned reassuringly at Johanna and began climbing down; and as the gray daylight above was cut off, replaced by flickering lamplight from below, he was uncomfortably reminded of the tunnels under Highgate Cemetery.

The cellar floor was spongy wood planks that made sucking sounds when he stepped away from the ladder to give McKee room, and a mismatched couple of kerosene lamps on a low table threw a yellow glare across shelves of boots and shoes, all very well worn. Hammocks were hung on the other side of the chamber, and Crawford saw several wide-eyed children in them gaping at him. A dozen crude straw dolls, perhaps the work of the children, were hung at various heights from the uneven ceiling and jiggled in the windless stale air.

After McKee, Christina climbed carefully down the ladder, her handbag swinging, gasping as each boot found a new rung and then not feeling for the next until her other boot had been firmly planted beside it. When at last she stood on the yielding wooden floor, she sighed deeply and wrinkled her nose at the ammonia-and-curry smell of the cellar.

Johanna came hopping down last, holding Crawford’s muddy coat.

All their clothes were dripping, but Crawford didn’t see that it would matter here.

“I’m known as Beetroot,” the man said cheerfully. “I don’t want to know who you people are.”

“We need a pair of shoes for the girl,” Crawford said. He was watching the hanging dolls and found that he was nearly whispering. “And the, the wine to prime them with is”—he went on, gesturing at Christina—“in her veins.”

“Oh? Oh!” The man frowned and took off both pairs of spectacles and then put them on again, reversed, and he waved the spread fingers of both hands rapidly in front of his face and peered at Christina and Johanna through the shaking fans of them. Finally he lowered his hands and said to Christina, “Which one did you redeem?”

“Which … one?” she asked weakly.

“There are only two sustaining originals, darling,” Beetroot said.

Christina glanced at Crawford, who shrugged and nodded, and then she looked down at the soggy floor. Very quietly, she said, “The, uh, male one.”

“Ah, the male one,” said Beetroot, “the European one! Yes, I’ll take a measure more of blood than ordinary, enough to make three pairs. No, four pairs, counting the pair for your girl.” He rubbed his bony hands together. “I’ll have my brats wear the others, to keep ’em from cooling off until I can sell them. People postpone hiding from God, or argue about my price for it, but I know three people who will pay quite a lot to hide from him.” He grinned at Crawford. “The cost to you will be much less.”

“No,” said Crawford, “this woman isn’t a — a cask for you to draw from! I’ve got money, I’ll pay for the standard—”

“You haven’t got as much as these fellows will pay, I assure you.” The man’s eyes rolled behind the doubled lenses.

Crawford opened his mouth to argue, but Christina shook her head at him and gripped Johanna’s shoulder. “I owe it,” she said.

Crawford sighed. “How much do I pay?”

“Since you’re providing me with surplus product,” said Beetroot judiciously, “make it one ha’penny — just enough so that you’ve committed yourself.”

Crawford dug in his pocket and gave the man a ha’penny coin. Committed myself, he thought — to what, in whose record?

The man turned away and opened an incongruously polished wooden box on the table by the lamps and lifted out a little silver bowl, a short wooden stick, and a tool like a screwdriver with a small perpendicular flange half an inch from the pointed tip.

A fleam and a bloodstick and a bleeding bowl, thought Crawford, much like what I’ve got back home in my surgery!

“I thought you ordinarily worked with consecrated wine?” he asked suspiciously.

“True, lad, but I needs must mix it every time with the blood of a man born in the river, underwater.” He had laid the tools down now and begun to roll up his ragged sleeve, and he held his right arm out toward Crawford. The inside of his elbow was hatched with white scar tissue. “Such as myself. Collision on the river in ’25—my mother drowned, but they saved me.” The man looked up at him and grinned. “Ordinarily I charge a good deal more than a ha’penny for this.” He turned toward the hammocks and called, “Andrew! Come tap the fleam!”

Christina was staring wide-eyed at the blade of the fleam, and she wasn’t reassured when a barefoot child came slapping up and picked up the instruments with grimy hands.

“Wait, I can do it,” said Crawford hastily, “for you and the lady here. I’ve done phlebotomies on more horses than there are men in the moon.”

“And I’ve had phlebotomies,” said Christina faintly. Her eyes fixed on Crawford’s. “Yes, I’d rather you did it.”

Andrew immediately returned to his hammock, and Beetroot shrugged.

“Johanna,” said Crawford, “can you hold the bowl?”

“Certainly,” she said, picking it up. She seemed brightly interested in the whole procedure.

More to reassure Christina than from consideration of the man’s health, Crawford lifted the glass chimney from one of the lamps and held the fleam blade in the flame until it was black; then he replaced the chimney and waved the blade in the air for a few moments to cool it off.

“Er… Adelaide,” he said, “would you hold his elbow out?”

McKee gripped Beetroot’s arm with both hands, presenting the inside of the elbow. The man was grinning, apparently at the unprecedented elaborateness of it all.

Crawford held the blade up, squinting at it. “You might not want to watch, Miss Christina.”

“Squeamishness,” she said, “is one thing I don’t suffer from.”

“Is there any liquor?” Crawford asked. “To clean the skin,” he added when Beetroot gave him an impatient look.

“Oh. Bottle of gin under the table.” The man laughed. “Clean the skin, is it!”

“Johanna, if you would. A splash on his elbow right over the vein, and then scrub it a bit with your handkerchief. And then hold the bowl under.”

The girl did as he said, afterward absently tipping the bottle up for a mouthful before setting it on the table. The sharp juniper smell filled the cellar, and the straw figures hanging from the ceiling seemed to dance more vigorously in the still air.

Crawford tried to ignore the crude dolls. He laid the pointed tip of the fleam against the scarring over the