Hide Me Among the Graves

Crawford took a sip of the whisky and relaxed — and he wondered if he had truly relaxed in years, or ever. The wound in his throat didn’t pain him now, and he let the towel fall away.

“I’m sorry I ran away from you, by the river,” he said. “All those years ago.”

Girard nodded judicially. “It would have been better for everyone if you had not,” he agreed. “But you’re at peace now.”

“Is there … you’re my son, still, in some ways … is there any way out?”

“Immediate high amputation has been known to prevent possession,” said Girard, “but it’s far too late for that, the seeds are all through your bloodstream by now — and in your case it would have involved cutting off your head.” He laughed softly.

Crawford stared at him. “Your mother, and Richard — they’re gone?”

“Down dead in the river beyond our reach, and certainly dissolved out in the sea long ago.”

“Do you — can you — miss them?”

“No. You don’t miss them either, do you?”

Crawford realized that in fact he did not. “If I hadn’t run away from you,” he said, looking curiously at the glass in his hand, “I’d never have met Adelaide. Johanna would not exist.”

“Our patron would have got another girl. He will now, if he can’t find this — this Johanna.” Girard’s nostrils flared as he pronounced the name.

“You hate her,” Crawford noted. The glass in his hand was more transparent than it should have been, and it occurred to him that the taste of the whisky was more a memory of whisky than an immediate sensation.

The glass had no weight either. He opened his hand, and the glass dissolved in place, like a puff of smoke.

“You’ll soon find better drink than whisky,” said the figure in the other chair. It still had the appearance of a young man, but the likeness to Crawford’s son had faded in a nondescript blandness. “When a son of mine, an extension of me, squanders his love on a mayfly, I hate the mayfly, and I would kill it. But she may yet become an extension of me.” The figure smiled again, but it was no longer the smile Crawford remembered. “You can help us find her. She would be vulnerable to you — her emotions are stronger than her reason.”

Crawford nodded. That was probably true.

He was aware of a springy lightness in his chest, a restlessness that had begun faintly to disperse the relaxation he’d been feeling moments ago. He wanted to be outdoors, in the streets, in the dark.

“Night is your time now,” said the thing that was now simply Polidori, with the remembered dark hair and mustache and deep-set eyes. “You’ll come to hate daylight. Your place by day will be among the tombs, and the regions under the tombs, but by night you will be a citizen of every place under the moon.”

Crawford stood up, and when he looked around his chair was gone; and when he looked back, there was no chair or person in the corner.

He found that he was walking to the hall, and then that he was opening the door and descending to the street.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.

For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his

electrical skin and glaring eyes…

For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.

For he can swim for life…

— Christopher Smart, “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry”

THE FULL MOON was visible to Crawford’s left, just clearing the sawtooth rooftops and transfixed by the black spire of St. Clement’s, but he walked the other way, into the shadows to Newcastle Street, and then he dodged cabs and carriages across the lamplit Strand to skirt the austere pillars and arches of Somerset House and turn left at Wellington Street, which led out onto Waterloo Bridge.

Polidori’s attention was as constant as a faint smell or a distant noise, but Crawford was already able to ignore it most of the time.

It wasn’t raining tonight, but when he had paid his ha’penny at the turnstile and walked out as far as the recessed stone seat above the third of the bridge’s arches over the river, he stopped with such deliberateness that he roused himself from the acquiescent daze that had been almost pleasantly dispersing all connected thoughts.

It seemed to him that it had been raining, here, on some night long ago. Why had he come here tonight?

In his momentary alertness, he noted that he had come out without a coat, and his shirtsleeves were rippling in what must have been a chilling wind — but he felt nothing, warm or cold.

There were no lamps on the bridge, and by the slanting moonlight he could clearly see the dome of St. Paul’s a mile away to the east.

He shivered as the nearly lost memory came back to him. It had been raining when he had walked out here fourteen years ago and seen Adelaide McKee for the first time — and a thing that must have been the Polidori demon had come rushing at them out of the sky, and Crawford had thrown McKee into the river and jumped in after her.

That had been the night on which Johanna was conceived.

He remembered now that Johanna and McKee were gone—Don’t go to Newhaven, he had told them not an hour ago, or Dieppe. I know about those. Go by some other route, to some other country. If you ever see me again — God forbid — run.

And Polidori had said, She would be vulnerable to you — her emotions are stronger than her reason.

Fourteen years ago he had wondered why he had walked out onto the bridge, and he had speculated that his unexamined purpose might have been to jump off the bridge — to commit suicide.

In fact, he had wound up jumping off the bridge that night, though it had not been to kill himself.

But now he remembered what McKee had said to Gabriel Rossetti, in Regent’s Park seven years ago, about Johanna: If she does die… I want to see that she stays dead.

The vampires’ awareness, their power, didn’t seem to work under the surface of the river. McKee had noted with approval that Crawford’s instinctive reaction on the bridge that night had been to get them both into the river. At the time he had remembered his parents advising that course of action, though he couldn’t remember anything about them now.

He walked past the remembered stone seat, slowly to the middle of the bridge. There was an inset seat here too, and he stepped up onto it.

The moon behind him was well clear of the skyline now, and the towers and chimneys of London were spread out in a vast receding mosaic of black and white on either hand, with the dark river moving wide between them.

Polidori’s attention became more palpably intrusive, and it was increasing by the moment.

Crawford set one booted foot firmly on the broad rail, and then with the other he stepped right out beyond it, into empty air.

Without the sensation of air rushing past him, he seemed for a couple of long seconds to be floating in the sky.

Then he struck the surface feet first and plunged deep, and he could feel temperature again — the water was so shockingly cold that he expelled his breath in a muffled yell that blew a gout of bubbles past his face; and he