The Stress of Her Regard

Of the sweets of Faeries, Peris, Goddesses,

There is not such a treat among them all,

Haunters of cavern, lake, and waterfall,

As a real woman, lineal indeed

From Pyrrha’s pebbles …

–John Keats, Lamia

And Venus blessed the marriage she had made.

–Ovid, Metamorphoses Book X, lines 94 and 95

CHAPTER 1

… and the midnight sky

Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Lucy,” the barmaid was saying in an emphatic whisper as she led the two men around the foot of the oak stairway, “which I’d think you could remember by now—and keep your damned voice down until we get outside.”

The flickering lantern in her hand struck an upwardly diminishing stack of horizontal gleams from the stair edges rising away to their right, and Jack Boyd, who had just asked the barmaid her name for the fourth time that evening, apparently decided that taking her upstairs would be a good idea, now that he had at least momentarily got straight what to call her.

“God, there’s no mistaking you’re one of the Navy men,” she hissed exasperatedly as she spun out of the big man’s drunken embrace and strode on across the hall to the dark doorway of the reserve dining room.

The off-balance Boyd sat down heavily on the lowest stair while Michael Crawford, who’d been hanging back in order to be able to walk without any undignified reeling, frowned and sadly shook his head. The girl was a bigot, ascribing to all Navy men the faults of an admittedly conspicuous few.

Appleton and the other barmaid were ahead of them, already in the dark dining room, and now Crawford heard a door being unbolted and pulled open, and the sudden cold draft in his face smelled of rain on trees and clay.

Lucy looked back over her shoulder at the drunken pair, and she hefted the bottle she had in her left hand. “An extra hour or two of bar service is what you paid for,” she whispered, “and Louise’s got the glasses, so unless you two want to toddle off to bed, trot yourselves along here—and don’t make no noise, the landlord’s asleep only two doors down this hall.” She disappeared through the dining room doorway.

Crawford leaned down unsteadily and shook Boyd’s shoulder. “Come on,” he said, “you’re disgracing me as well as yourself.”

“'Disgracing'?” mumbled the big man as he wobbled to his feet. “On the contrary—I intend to marry …” He paused and frowned ponderously. “To marry that young lady. Her name was what?”

Crawford propelled him into the dining room, toward the open door in the far wall and the night beyond it. Lucy was waiting for them impatiently in the far doorway, and by the wavering glow of her lamp Crawford noticed the lath and plaster panelling on the walls, and he remembered the ornate double chimney-stacks he’d glimpsed over the roof when the stagecoach had turned off the Horsham road this afternoon; evidently the inn’s Georgian front had been added onto an old Tudor structure. He wouldn’t be surprised if the kitchen had a stone floor.

“We’ll make it a double wedding tomorrow,” Boyd went on over his shoulder as he bumped against chairs in the dark. “You wouldn’t object to sharing the glory, would you? Of course this means I won’t be able to be your groomsman—but hell, I’m sure Appleton would be groomsman for both of us.”

The pattering hiss of the rain was much louder when they were out on the roofed porch, and the chilly air sluiced some of the wine fumes from Crawford’s head. The porch, he saw, began at the door they’d come out of and extended south, away from the landlord’s room, almost all the way to the stables. Appleton and Louise had already sat down in two of the weather-beaten chairs that stood randomly along the deck, and Lucy was pouring wine into their glasses.

Crawford stepped to the edge of the porch so that the curtain of rain tumbled past only inches in front of his nose. Out in the dark yard he could dimly make out patches of grass and the shaggy, waving blackness of trees beyond.

He was about to turn back to the porch when the sky was split with a dazzling glare of white, and an instant later he was rocked back on his heels by a thunderclap that he was momentarily certain must have stripped half the shingles from the inn’s roof. Thinly over the crash he could hear a woman scream.

“Damn me!” he gasped, taking an involuntary step backward as the tremendous echoes rolled away east across the Weald to frighten children in distant Kent. “Did you see that?” His ears were ringing and he was speaking too loudly.

After a few seconds he exhaled sharply, and grinned. “I guess that’s a stupid question, isn’t it? But truly, Boyd, if that had struck any closer, it’s a different sort of church ceremony you’d be bringing me to tomorrow.”

It was an effort to speak jocularly—his face was beaded with sudden sweat as if he’d stepped out into the rain, and the air was sharp with a smell like the essence of fright, and for a moment it had seemed to him that he was participating in the earth’s own shudder of shock. He turned and blinked behind him—his eyes had readjusted to the darkness enough for him to see that his companions hadn’t moved, though the two women looked scared.

“No chance,” Boyd called, sitting down and filling his glass. “I remember seeing Corbie’s Aunt clinging round your head in a storm off Vigo. The stuff likes you.”

“And who,” spoke up Appleton, his voice expressing only amusement, “is Corbie’s aunt?”

Crawford sat down himself and took a glass with fingers he willed not to tremble. “Not who,” he said. “What. It’s Italian, really, supposed to be Corposanto or Capra Saltante or something like that. St. Elmo’s Fire, the English call it—ghostly lights that cling to the masts and yardarms of ships. Some people,” he added, pouring wine into his glass and waving it toward Boyd before taking a deep gulp, “believe the phenomenon’s related to lightning.”

Boyd was on his feet again, pointing toward the south end of the yard. “And what are those buildings down there?”

Lucy wearily assured him that there weren’t any buildings at that end of the yard and told him to keep his voice down.

“I saw ‘em,” Boyd insisted. “In that flash of lightning. Little low places with windows.”

“He means them old coaches,” said Louise. She shook her head at Boyd. “It’s just a couple of old berlines that belonged to Blunden’s father that haven’t been moved in thirty or forty years—the upholstery’s probably shot, not to mention the axles.”

“Axles—who needs ‘em? Mike, whistle up Corbie’s Aunt again, will you? She’ll motivate the hulks.” Already Boyd was off the porch and striding jerkily across the muddy yard toward the old coaches.

“Oh hell,” sighed Appleton, pushing back his chair. “I suppose we have to catch him and put him to bed. You didn’t think to bring any laudanum, of course?”

“No—I’m supposed to be on holiday, remember? I didn’t even bring a lancet or forceps.” Crawford stood up, and was a little surprised to discover that he wasn’t annoyed at the prospect of having to go out into the rain. Even the idea of going for an imaginary ride in a ruined coach seemed to have a certain charm.

He had left his hat in the taproom, but the rain was pleasantly cool on his face and the back of his neck, and he strode cheerfully across the dark yard, trusting to luck to keep his boots out of any deep puddles. Behind him he could hear Appleton and the women following.

He saw Boyd stumble and flailingly recover his balance a few yards short of the vague rectangular blackness that was the coaches, and when Crawford got to that spot he saw why—the coaches sat on an irregular patch of ancient pavement that stood a few inches higher than the mud.

A yellow light waxed behind him, bright enough to reflect gold glints from the wet greenery and to let him see Boyd clambering up the side of one of the coaches—Appleton and the women were following, and Lucy still had the lantern. Crawford stopped to let them catch up.

“Gallop, my cloudy steeds!” yelled Boyd from inside one of the coaches. “And why don’t you sit a little closer, Auntie?”

“I suppose if he’s got to go mad, this is the best place for it,” remarked Lucy nervously, holding up the steaming lantern and peering ahead through the downpour. “These old carriages are just junk, and Blunden’s not likely to hear his ravings out this far from the buildings.” She trembled and the light wavered.

“I’m going back inside, though.”

Crawford didn’t want the party to end—it was the last one he’d ever have as a bachelor. “Wait just a minute,” he said, “I can get him out of there.” He started forward, then paused, squinting down at the pavement. It was hard to be sure, with the rain agitating the muddy water pooled on it, but it seemed to him that there were bas-relief carvings in the paving stones.

“What was this, originally?” he asked. “Did there used to be a building here?”

Appleton cursed impatiently.

“Back in the olden days there was,” said Louise, who was clinging to Appleton’s arm and absently spilling wine down the front of his shirt. “Romans or somebody built it. We’re always finding bits of statues and things when the rains fatten the creeks in the spring.”

Crawford remembered his speculations on the age of this establishment, and he realized that he’d misguessed by a thousand years or so.

Boyd yelled something indistinct and thrashed around noisily in the old coach.

Lucy shivered again. “It’s awful cold out here.”

“Oh, don’t go in just yet,” Crawford protested. He handed his wine glass to Appleton and then awkwardly struggled out of his coat. “Here,” he said, crossing to Lucy and draping it over her shoulders. “That’ll keep you warm. We’ll only be a minute or two out here, and I did pay you to keep serving us for a couple of hours past closing time.”

“Not for out in the damned rain you didn’t. But all right, a couple of minutes.”

Appleton glanced around suddenly, as if he’d heard something over the gravelly hiss of the rain. “I—I’m going in myself,” he said, and for the first time that evening his voice lacked its usual sarcastically confident edge.

“Who are you?” Boyd yelled, all at once sounding frightened. A furious banging began inside the coach, and in the lamplight it could be seen to rock jerkily on its ancient springs; but the racket seemed dwarfed by the night, and disappeared without any echo among the dark ranks of trees.

“Good night,” said Appleton. He turned and began leading Louise hurriedly back toward the inn buildings.

“Get away from me!” screamed Boyd.

“My God, wait up,” muttered Lucy, starting after Appleton and Louise. The rain was suddenly coming down more heavily than ever, rattling on the inn roof and the road out front and on lonely hilltops miles away in the night, and over the noise of it Crawford thought for a moment he heard a chorus of high, harsh voices singing in the sky.

Instantly he was sprinting back after the other three, and only after he caught up with Lucy did he realize that he’d been about to abandon Boyd. As always happened in moments of crisis, a couple of unwelcome pictures sprang into his mind—an overturned boat in choppy surf, and a pub across the street from a burning house—and he didn’t want to take the chance of adding the back yard of this inn to that torturing catalogue; and so when Lucy turned to him he quickly thought of some other reason than fright for having run after her.

“My ring,” he gasped. “The wedding ring I’ve—got to give to my bride tomorrow—it’s in the pocket of the coat. Excuse me.” He reached into the pocket, groped around for a moment, and then came up with it between his thumb and forefinger. “That’s all.”

By the light of the lamp she was carrying he could see her face tighten with offense at the implied insult, but he turned away and started resolutely back through the rain to where Boyd was screaming in the darkness.

“I’m coming, you great idiot,” he called, trying to influence the night with his confident tone.

He noticed that he was carrying the wedding ring in his hand, holding it as tightly as a sailor undergoing surgery bites a bullet. That wasn’t smart—if he dropped it out here in all this mud it wouldn’t be found for years.

Over the noise of the rain he could hear Boyd roaring.

Crawford’s tight breeches didn’t have any pockets, and he was afraid the undersized ring would fall off his own finger if he wound up having to struggle with Boyd; in desperation he looked around for a narrow upright tree branch or something to hang the ring on, and then he noticed the white statue standing by the back wall of the stable.

It was a life-sized sculpture of a nude woman with the left hand raised in a beckoning gesture, and as Boyd roared again Crawford splashed across the mud to the statue, slipped the ring onto the ring finger of the upraised stone hand, and then ran on to the derelict coaches.

It was easy to see which one the crazed Navy lieutenant was in—the carriage was shaking to pieces as if it had a magically sympathetic twin that was rolling down a mountain ravine somewhere. Hurrying around to the side of it, Crawford managed to get hold of the door handle and wrench the door open.

Two hands shot out of the darkness and grabbed the collar of his shirt, and he yelled in alarm as Boyd pulled him inside; the big man threw him onto one of the mildew-reeking seats and lunged past him toward the doorway, and though a web of rotted upholstery had got tangled around Boyd’s feet and now sent him sprawling, the big man had managed to get at least the top half of his body outside.

For a moment Crawford seemed to hear the distant singing again, and when something brushed gently against his cheek he let out a roar as wild as any of Boyd’s and jackknifed up onto his feet; but before he could vault over the other man, he braced himself against the wall—and then he relaxed a little, for he could feel that all the loose threads of the upholstery were bristlingly erect like the fur on the back of an angry dog, and he realized that the same phenomenon must have been what made the shreds of the seat upholstery stand up and brush his face a moment ago.

Very well, he told himself firmly, I admit it’s strange, but it’s nothing to lose your wits over. Just some electrical effect caused by the storm and the odd physical properties of decaying leather and horsehair. Right now your job is to get poor Boyd back to the inn.

Boyd had by this time freed himself and crawled out onto the puddled pavement, and as Crawford climbed down from the coach he was getting shakily to his feet. He squinted around suspiciously at the trees and the ruined carriages.

Crawford took his arm, but the bigger man shook it off and plodded away through the rain toward the inn.

Crawford caught up with him and then matched his plodding stride. “Big beetles under your shirt, were there?” he asked casually after a few paces. “Would have sworn rats were scrambling up your pant legs? I’ll bet you wet your pants, in fact, though as rain-soaked as you are nobody’ll notice. Delirium tremens, we doctors call this show. It’s how you know when to back off on the drink.”

Ordinarily he wouldn’t have been as blunt as this, even with someone he knew as well as he knew Jack Boyd, but tonight it almost seemed to be the most tactful approach—after all, no one could be blamed for suffering a case of the galloping horrors if the cause was simply a profound excess of alcohol.

Actually he was afraid Boyd had not been quite that drunk.

The party was clearly over. Lucy and Louise were complaining about having to go to bed with wet hair, and Appleton was evasively irritable and, as if to confirm the soured mood, the landlord muttered angrily in his room and caused either his knees or the floorboards to creak threateningly. The women abandoned the lantern and fled to their rooms, and Appleton shook his head disgustedly and stalked upstairs to go to bed himself. Crawford and Boyd appropriated the lantern and tiptoed to the closed door of the taproom and tried the lock.

It wouldn’t yield.

“Probably just as well,” sighed Crawford.

Boyd shook his head heavily, then turned and started toward the stairs; halfway there he paused and without looking back said, “Uh … thanks for getting me … out of that, Mike.”

Crawford waved, and then realized that Boyd couldn’t see the gesture. “No trouble,” he called softly instead. “I’ll probably need something similar myself sooner or later.”

Boyd stumped away, and Crawford heard his ponderous footsteps recede up the stairs and down some hall overhead. Crawford tried the taproom door again, with no more luck than before, briefly considered finding out where the barmaids’ rooms were, and then shrugged, picked up the lamp and went upstairs himself. His room wasn’t large, but the sheets were clean and dry and there were enough blankets on the bed.

As he got undressed, he thought again of the overturned boat and the house across the street from the pub. Twenty years had passed since that rowboat foundered in the Plymouth Sound surf, and the house had burned down nearly six years ago, but it seemed to him that they were still the definition of him, the axioms from which he was derived.

Long ago he had started carrying a flask so that he could banish these memories long enough to get to sleep, and he uncorked it now.

Thunder woke him up hours later, and he lifted his head from the pillow and reflected sleepily on how nice it was to be drunk in bed when the lanes and trees and hills outside were so cold and wet … and then he remembered the wedding ring he had left in the yard.

His belly went cold and he half sat up, but after a moment he relaxed. You can get it in the morning, he told himself—wake up early and retrieve it before anyone else is up and about. And who’s likely to be rooting around out behind the stables, anyway? Sleep’s what you need right now. You’re getting married later today—you’ve got to get your rest.

He lay back down and pulled the blankets up under his chin, but he had no sooner closed his eyes than he thought, stableboys. Stableboys will probably be working out there, and I’ll bet they’re on the job early. But maybe they won’t notice the ring on the statue’s finger … a gold ring, that is, with a good-sized diamond set in it. Very well, then surely they’ll report the find, knowing that they’ll be rewarded … after all, if they tried to sell it they’d get only a fraction of its real value … which was two months’ worth of my income.

Damn it.

Crawford crawled out of bed and found the lamp and his tinder box, and after several minutes of furious striking he managed to get the lamp lit. He looked unhappily at his sodden clothes, still lying in the corner where he’d thrown them several hours ago. Aside from one change of clothes, the only other things he had brought along to wear were the formal green frock coat and embroidered waistcoat and white breeches in which he was to get married.

He pulled the wet shirt and breeches on, cringing and gasping at the cold unwieldiness of them. He decided to forego the shoes, and just tottered barefoot to the door, trying to walk so steadily that his shirt would not touch him any more than it had to.

He almost abandoned the whole undertaking when he unbolted the outer door of the spare dining room and a rainy gust plastered his shirt against his chest, but he knew that worry wouldn’t let him get any rest if he went back to bed without fetching the ring, so he whispered a curse and stepped out.

It was a lot colder now, and darker. The chairs were still on the porch, but he had to grope to know where they were. The south end of the yard, where the stables and the old carriages were, was darker than the sky.

The mud was grittily slimy between his toes as he stepped off the porch and plodded out across the yard, and he hoped nobody had dropped a wine glass out here. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, for in addition to worrying about cutting his feet he was remembering Boyd’s eerie ravings of a few hours ago, and he was acutely aware of being the only wakeful human being within a dozen miles.

The statue was hard to find. He found the stable, and plodded the length of it, dragging his hand along the planks of the wall, with no luck; he was about to panic, thinking that the statue had been carried away, when he rounded the corner and dimly saw the inn buildings away off to his left, which meant that he had somehow been checking the south wall instead of the west one; he reversed course and carefully followed two more walls, conscientiously making the right-angle turn between them, but this time he found himself dragging his numbing fingers along the wall of the inn itself, which wasn’t even connected to the stable; he shook his head, amazed that he could still be this drunk. Finally he just began stomping out a zigzag pattern across the nighted yard with his arms spread wide.

And he found it that way.

His fingers brushed the cold, rain-slick stone as he was groping back toward the stable wall, and he almost sobbed with relief. He slid his hand up the extended stone wrist to the stone hand—the ring was still there. He tried to push it up off of the statue’s finger, but it was stuck somehow.

An instant later he saw why, for a flash of lightning abruptly lit the yard: and the stone hand was now closed in a fist, imprisoning the ring like the end link of a chain. There were no cracks, no signs of any fracture—the statue’s hand seemed not ever to have been in any other position. Rain was streaming down the white stone face, and its blank white eyes seemed to be staring at Crawford.

The nearly instantaneous crash of thunder seemed to punch the ground spinning out from under him, and when his feet hit the mud again he was running, racing the tumbling echoes back toward the inn, and it seemed to him that he got inside and slammed the door against the night just as the thunder crashed over the inn like a wave over a rock.

When Crawford awoke, several hours later, it was with the certainty that horrible things had happened and that strenuous activity would soon be required of him to prevent things from getting even worse; his head was throbbing too solidly for him to remember what the catastrophe was, or even where he was, but perhaps, as he told himself blurrily, that was something to be grateful for. More sleep was what he wanted most in the world, but when he opened his eyes he saw a smear of nearly dried mud on the sheet … and when he threw back the covers he saw that his feet and ankles were caked with it.

With a gasp of real alarm he bounded out of bed. What on earth had he been doing last night? Sleepwalking? And where was Caroline? Had she thrown him out? Perhaps this place was some kind of madhouse.

Then he saw the portmanteau under the window, and he remembered that he was in a village called Warnham, in Sussex, on his way to Bexhill-on-Sea to get married again. Caroline had died in that fire nearly six years ago. Oddly, this was the first time since her death that he had even momentarily forgotten that she was gone.

So how had his feet got so dirty? Had he walked to this inn? Surely not barefoot. No, he thought, I remember now, I took the stagecoach here to meet Appleton and Boyd—Boyd is to be my groomsman, and Appleton is letting me pretend to Julia’s father that his elegant landau carriage is mine.

Crawford let himself relax a little, and he tried to conjure some cheer in himself, to see his recent fright and present sickness as just the consequences of old friends out carousing.

If I was in the company of those two last night, he thought with a nervous and self-consciously rueful smile, God knows there are any number of ways I might have got so dirty; I suppose mayhem is assured—I only hope we didn’t commit any murders or rapes. As a matter of fact I do seem to recall seeing a nude woman … no, that was only a statue …

And then he remembered it all, and his fragile cheer was gone.

His face went cold and he sat down. Surely that must have been a dream, that closed stone fist; or maybe the statue’s hand never had been open, maybe that was what he had imagined, and he had really just drunkenly pushed the ring at the hand and then not noticed it fall when he had let go of it. And then there must have been something else, a bit of wire or something, around the stone finger when he saw it later.

With the blue sky glowing now in the swirls of the window’s bull’s-eye panes, it was not too difficult to believe that it had all been a dream or a drunken mistake. It had to be, after all.

In the meantime he had lost the ring.

Feeling very old and frail, he unstrapped the portmanteau and pulled on his spare set of travelling clothes. Now he wanted hot coffee—brandy and water would be more restoring, but he had to go find the ring with as clear a head as possible.

Appleton and Boyd weren’t up yet, which Crawford was glad of, and after choking down a cup of hot tea—the only drink available in the kitchen—he spent an hour walking around the inn’s muddy back yard; he was tense but hopeful when he started, but by the time the sun had climbed high enough to silhouette the branches of the oaks across the road he was in a fury of despair. The landlord came out after a while, and though he expressed sympathy, and even offered to sell Crawford a ring to replace the one he’d lost, he was unable to remember ever having seen any statue of a nude woman in the area.

Finally at about ten Crawford’s two companions came tottering down for breakfast. Crawford sat with them, but nobody had much to say, and he ordered only brandy.

CHAPTER 2

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long;

For sideways would she lean, and sing

A faery’s song.

—John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci

The storm clouds had scattered away northward, and Appleton folded down the accordion-like calash roof of his carriage so that as they drove they could bake the “drink-poisons” out of their systems in the summer sun; but most of the roads between Warnham and the sea proved to be very narrow, walled on either side with stones heaped up centuries ago by farmers clearing the moors, and to Crawford it several times felt as if they were driving through some sunken antediluvian corridor.

Ancient oaks spread branches across the sky overhead, seeming to strive to provide the corridor’s missing roof, and though Appleton’s hired driver cursed when the carriage was slowed for a while by a tightly packed flock of two dozen sheep being languidly goaded along by a collie and a white-bearded old man, Crawford was glad of their company—the landscape had been getting too close-pressing and inanimate.

At about noon they stopped at a tavern in Worthing, and on a chestnut-shaded terrace overlooking the glittering expanse of the English Channel they restored themselves with several pitchers of bitter ale, and a dozen pickles, and three vast beef-and-gravy pastries with each man’s initials stamped into the crust so that they could keep straight which was whose when they unwrapped the uneaten ends later in the day.

Eventually Crawford pushed his plate away, refilled his glass, and then squinted belligerently at his companions. “I lost the ring,” he said. The sea breeze blew his brown hair back from his forehead, letting the sun catch the gray hairs at his temples in the moments when he wasn’t shaded by the waving branches or the seagulls sailing noisily back and forth over the shore slope.

Appleton blinked at him. “The ring,” he echoed blankly.

“The goddamn wedding ring, the one Jack’s supposed to hand to me tonight—I lost it last night, when we were larking about in the back yard of that inn.”

Jack Boyd shook his head. “Christ, I’m sorry, Mike, that was my fault, going crazy the way I did—I got no business drinking so much. I’ll buy you a new one some how—”

“No, I’m to blame,” interrupted Appleton with a smile which, though rueful, was his first genuine one of the day. “I was soberer than you two, but I got scared of the dark and ran out on you—hell, Michael, I even saw you take the ring out of the pocket of your coat, after you’d draped the coat over the barmaid who was getting chilled, and I knew it was risky, but I was in such a sweat to get back inside that I didn’t want to bring it up. I insist you let me pay for it.”

Crawford stood up and drank off the last of his ale. Even now his face had not lost quite all of the deep-bitten tan acquired in shipboard life, and when he smiled he looked vaguely foreign, like some kind of American or Australian. “No no, I’m the one that lost it—and anyway I’ve already bought a replacement from the landlord back there. It cost me half my travelling money, but I think it’ll do.” He held out a ring on the palm of his hand for them to look at.

Appleton had at last regained his usual manner. “Well, yes,” he said judiciously, “these southern rustics will probably never have seen real gold … or any kind of metal, conceivably. Yes, you ought to be all right with that. What’s the name of the place again? Undercut-by-the-Sea?”

Crawford opened his mouth to remind him that it was called Bexhill-on-Sea, but, now that at least a tenuous sort of cheer had been restored, he didn’t want to seem stuffy. “Something like that,” he said dryly as they wrapped up the leftovers and started back toward where the hired driver waited by the carriage.

The roads were open now, with the sea generally visible to their left as the carriage rocked along past the stone jetties of Brighton and Hove—Boyd made deprecatory remarks about the little boats whose ivory sails stippled the blue water—and even when they turned to follow the Lewes road inland across the South Downs, the green fields stretched broadly away to the hills on either side, and the walls between the fields were low.

The only jarring moment came when they were passing the north face of Windover Hill, and Crawford awoke from an uneasy doze and saw the giant figure of a man carved crudely into the chalk of the distant hillside; Crawford instantly scrambled up into a crouch on the seat and grabbed the door as if he intended to vault out of the carriage and simply run back toward the sea, but Boyd caught him and pushed him back down into the seat.

He stared fearfully at the figure, and his companions shifted around to see what had so upset him.

“For Christ’s sake, Mike,” said Boyd nervously, “it’s only an old Saxon hill-figure, like there’s dozens of throughout these parts. The Wilmington Long Man, that lad’s called. It’s just a—”

Crawford, still not completely awake, interrupted him—“Why is it watching us?” he whispered, staring across the miles of farmland at the pale outline on the hill.

“You were having a dream,” said Appleton a little shrilly. “What do you drink for if it gives you dreams like this?” He dug a flask out of his coat pocket, took a deep swallow, and then leaned forward and ordered the driver to go faster.

Late in the afternoon they passed the first outlying stone-and-thatch cottages of Bexhill-on-Sea; a few miles farther and they were among the shaded lanes of the town, driving past rows of neat seventeenth-century houses, all built of the local honey-colored limestone. Flowers brightened the boundaries of the yards and lanes, and the house at whose gate they stopped was hardly visible from the road because of the hundreds of red and yellow roses that bobbed on vines woven around the posts of the front fence.

As Crawford climbed down from the carriage to the grass, a boy who had been crouched beside the gate leaped to his feet and sprinted across the lawn and into the house. A few moments later the abrupt, mournful wail of a bagpipe startled birds out of the trees overhead, and Appleton, who had followed Crawford out of the carriage and was now trying to pull the wrinkles out of his coat, winced when he heard it.

“Blood sacrifice?” he asked politely. “Planning some sort of druid rite, are you?”

“No,” said Crawford defensively, “uh, it’s going to be a traditional Scottish ceremony, I understand. Wrong end of the island, of course, but …”

“Christ,” put in Boyd anxiously, “they’re not going to make us eat those stuffed sheep stomachs, are they? What do they call it? Havoc?”

“Haggis. No, the food’ll be conventional, but … oh, they’ll have whitened Julia’s eyebrows with antimony, and I sent ahead ajar of henna so the bridesmaids could stain her feet with it after they wash them—”

He was reaching toward the back of the carriage for his portmanteau when he froze.

“Hey, Mike,” said Boyd, leaning down from the carriage to grab Crawford’s shoulder, “are you getting sick? You’re suddenly pale as a low sky.”

Crawford shivered, but then continued his interrupted reach to the boot; with trembling fingers he began unbuckling the leather straps. “N-no, I’m fine,” he said. “I just … remembered something.”

Mention of the washing of feet had brought back a hitherto lost memory of last night—he had washed his feet, and taken off his muddy trousers too, after fleeing back to his room from the statue; and he hadn’t cleaned up because of any particular fastidiousness, it seemed to him now, but out of an irrational fear of Sussex dirt. So he must have gone outside one more time … at least. He searched his memory now for any recollection of it, but could come up with nothing.

Could he have been searching for the ring again? The question frightened him as soon as he posed it to himself, for it implied the conceivability of some other reason. He forced himself to concentrate on unstrapping his luggage.

People were coming out of the house now. Crawford recognized the minister who had had him and Julia to tea at the local rectory a fortnight ago; and the man behind him was Julia’s father; and the lady in the blue velvet stole—whose shuffling, undersea-creature gait was the result, he decided, of a reluctance to look down at the stepping stones for fear of disarranging her tall rose-studded coiffure—must have been Julia’s aunt, though previously Crawford had only seen her in a housedress, with her hair pulled up in a tight bun.

And the scowling girl hanging behind, he thought warily, must be Julia’s twin sister Josephine. She’s got Julia’s coloring, I suppose, but she’s far too thin—and why does she hunch her shoulders so? Maybe this is the defensive “mechanical” pose Julia told me she assumes in stressful situations—if so it’s even less attractive, and far less funny, than Julia described it.

Away from the leather-and-meat-pie smell of the carriage, he noticed for the first time the smells of rural East Sussex—clay and flowers and a whiff of a distant dairy. It was all a long way from the musks of sick people and the sharp reek of vinegar-washed hospital walls.

He had got his bags free, and he set them down on the road’s gravel verge just in time for the boy, rushing back again, to pick them up and wrestle them in a sort of running waddle back toward the house. Remembering that Josephine disapproved of her sister’s marrying a physician—particularly one who currently specialized in an area of medicine that was by tradition the domain of unprofessional old women—Crawford pretended not to see her, and instead made a show of greeting her father and aunt.

“Julia’s upstairs,” her father said as he led the new arrivals toward the house, “worrying about her hair and her clothes. You know how brides are.” Crawford thought he heard Josephine mutter something behind him, and then the old man seemed to realize that he had said something awkward. “By which—uh—I mean merely—”

Crawford forced a smile. “I’m sure she needn’t worry about such things,” he said. “I’ve never seen her looking less than splendid.”

Visibly relieved to have got past his apparent reference to Crawford’s first wife, old Mr. Carmody nodded rapidly, blinking and smiling. “Oh, to be sure, to be sure. The very image of her departed mother, she is.”

Crawford was glancing back toward the road and the carriage as Mr. Carmody said this, and so he saw the expression on Josephine’s narrow face change instantly from spite to vacuity; she kept walking, but her arms and legs were stiff now, and her head, when she looked away, moved in one abrupt jerk, like the instantaneous movement of a spider. Her nostrils were wide and white. Clearly this was her mechanical pose.

He looked ahead at her father, expecting more apologetic mumbling for having brought up what was clearly another subject, but the old man stumped on unaware, grinning and shaking his head at some comment Appleton had made.

Crawford raised an eyebrow. The old man didn’t seem unobservant or thoughtless—but surely, if the subject of his deceased wife was so evidently traumatic to one of his daughters, he ought sometime to have noticed? He’d have had twenty years to stumble across the fact, for the twins’ mother had bled to death minutes after having given birth to Josephine, the second of them.

Once inside the house, the travellers were given mugs of cider and plates of bread and cheese, and, as they worked their way through the refreshments, they pretended to enjoy the efforts of the young man wringing doomful melodies out of the bagpipe. At last Mr. Carmody halted the recital and offered to show his guests to their rooms.

Crawford obediently went to his room and washed his face in the basin on the dresser, but then he went back out into the hall and stole down to Julia’s room. She answered his knock and proved to be alone in spite of the wedding preparations, and she was still dressed casually in a green cotton dress. With her shoes off she seemed even shorter than usual, making her abundant figure and narrow waist even more startling. Her long brown hair was still slightly damp from a recent washing.

“You’re nearly a full day late,” she said after she’d kissed him. “Break a wheel?”

“Delayed by a rough delivery,” he told her. “A charity ward case—her family only got her to the hospital after some midwife had made an almost fatal hash of the job.” He sat down on the window seat. “I finally got to see your sister, out front just now. She really doesn’t look well.”

Julia sat beside him and took his hand. “Oh, poor Josephine is just upset that you’re taking me away. I’ll miss her, too, but I’ve got a life of my own. She’s got to … become Josephine.” Julia shrugged. “Whoever that may turn out to be.”

“Somebody in some trouble, I think. How long has she been doing that mechanical trick?”

“Oh, ever since she was a baby, practically—she asked me once when we were children what I did to keep the night-scaries from getting me when I was in bed at night. I asked her what she did, and she said she would rock back and forth like a pump-arm or a clockwork or something, so that the scaries would say to themselves,” Julia assumed a deep voice, “oh, this isn’t human, this isn’t prey—this is some kind of a construction.” Julia smiled sadly.

“She did it out in the yard a little while ago, though, when your father mentioned your mother. She could hardly have thought the night-boogers were after her then.”

“No, she isn’t afraid of ghosty things anymore, poor thing. Now she just does her clockwork trick when things happen that she can’t bear—I guess she reckons that if Josephine can’t stand whatever’s going on right now, it’s best if Josephine stops existing for a while, until it’s over.”

“Jesus.” Crawford looked out the window at the sunlit leaves in the high branches. “Is that … I mean, did you and your father … you have tried to help her over this, this thing about her, your mother, have you? Because—”

“Of course we have,” Julia spread her hands. “But it’s never done any good. We’ve always told her that my mother’s death wasn’t her fault. She just won’t listen—ever since she was a little girl she’s had the idea that she killed her.”

Crawford looked out the window at the path on which he’d first seen Josephine, and he shook his head.

“We really have tried to help her, Michael. You know me, you know I would. But it’s useless—and really, try to imagine what we’ve gone through living with her! Good lord, until only a few years ago she’d every now and then believe she was me—it was humiliating, she’d wear my clothes, visit my friends—I can’t … tell you how I felt. You must have known some young girls when you were growing up, you must have seen how easily their feelings get hurt! Honestly, I really thought sometimes that I’d have to run away, make new friends somewhere else. And of course my friends had a fine time then pretending to mistake me for her.” Crawford nodded sympathetically. “Say, she’s not going to do it now, is she?” He winced at the thought of Josephine making some scene by pretending that she was his bride.

Julia laughed. “That would be dramatic, wouldn’t it? No, I finally stopped it by following her one day and confronting her as she was harassing some of my friends. And even then she tried to continue the … pretense for a minute or so. My friends nearly choked, they were laughing so hard. It was hard for me to do, to humiliate both of us that way, but it worked.” Julia stood up and smiled. “Now you’re not supposed to be in here—be off and get dressed, we’ll be seeing each other soon enough.”

The wedding was performed at nine o’clock that evening in the wide Carmody drawing room, with the bride and groom kneeling on cushions on the floor. During almost the entire ceremony the late summer sun slanted in through the west windows and glowed gold and rose in the crystal glasses ranged on a shelf, and as the light faded and servants brought in lamps, the minister declared Michael and Julia man and wife by the authority vested in him.

Josephine had been the strikingly unemotional maid of honor, and at this point she and Boyd were supposed to go out to the kitchen and come back, Josephine with an oatcake and Boyd with a wooden stoup of strong ale; the stoup was to be passed around the company after Crawford took the first gulp, and Josephine was to break the oatcake ceremoniously over Julia’s head, symbolically assuring Julia’s fertility and bestowing good luck on the guests who picked up the crumbs from the floor.

But when Josephine held the little cake over Julia’s head, she stared at it for a moment and then lowered it and crouched to set it carefully on the floor. “I can’t break her in half,” she said quietly, as if to herself, and then she walked slowly back to the kitchen.

“Well, so much for children,” said Crawford into the resulting silence. He drank some of the ale, and covered his embarrassment with a savoring grin. “Good brewers they have hereabouts,” he said quietly to Boyd as he passed the stoup to him. “Thank God it was the biscuit that they made her carry, and not this.”

Actually, Crawford wanted to have children—his first marriage had produced none, and he hoped the defect had been poor Caroline’s and not his … and he didn’t want to believe the rumor that Caroline had been pregnant when the house she’d been living in burned down, for at that point he had not even spoken to her for a year.

He was, after all, an obstetrician—an accoucheur—and in spite of the two years he had spent stitching up the wounds and sawing off the shattered limbs of His Majesty’s sailors in the wars with Spain and the United States, delivering babies was what he did best. He wished Julia’s mother could have been attended by someone with his own degree of skill.

The difficult delivery at St. George’s Hospital had made him and Boyd miss the stagecoach they were originally to have taken south from London early yesterday, and while they had waited in the taproom of the coaching inn for the next one, Boyd had irritably asked him why, after all his complicated surgical training, he should choose to devote his career to an area of medicine which not only made him late for his own wedding, but which “old wives have been handling just fine for thousands of years anyway.”

Crawford had called for another pitcher, refilled his glass and then tried to explain.

“First off, Jack, they haven’t been handling it ‘just fine.’ Most expectant mothers would be better off with no attendance at all than with a midwife. I’m generally called in only after the midwife has made some awful mistake, and some of the scenes I’ve walked in on would make you turn pale—yes, even you with your scars from Abukir and Trafalgar. And there’s a difference when it’s an infant, a person who … who you can’t think up any well-at-any-rates for—you know, ‘Well at any rate he knew what he was getting into when he signed on,’ or ‘Well at any rate if the man ever lived who deserved it, it was him,’ or ‘Well at any rate he had his faith to sustain him through this.’ An infant is … what, innocent, but more than that, not only innocent but aware too. It’s a person who hasn’t seen or understood or agreed to anything, but will, if given time—and therefore you can’t be satisfied with a merely good rate of survival for them, the way you can with … oh, tomato seedlings or pedigreed dog litters.”

“Still,” Boyd had said, “it’ll no doubt be squared away and systematized before long. Is there really enough there to occupy your whole life?”

Crawford had paused to drain his glass and call for another pitcher. “Uh … yes. Yes. Plain old prudery is what has kept it so primitive—it’s made a, a fenced off jungle of this area of medicine. Even now a male doctor can usually only assist at a delivery if they’ve got a sheet draped over the mother—he has to do his best with groping about blindly underneath, and so a lot of times he cuts the umbilical cord in the wrong place, and the mother or the child bleeds to death. And no one has begun to figure out what sorts of foods an expectant mother should eat or not eat in order to have a healthy child. And the goddamned ‘literature’ on the whole subject is just an accumulation of bad guesses and superstitions and misfiled veterinary notes.”

The fresh pitcher arrived, and Boyd paid for it. Crawford, still absorbed in his subject, laughed then, though his frown didn’t unkink.

“Hell, man,” he went on, automatically refilling his glass, “only a few years ago I looked up in the Corporation of Surgeons’ library a Swiss manuscript catalogued as being on the subject of caesarian birth, in a big portfolio known as The Menotti Miscellany … and I discovered that it wasn’t about birth at all—the person who catalogued the manuscript had simply looked at the drawings in the wrong order.”

Boyd frowned at that, then raised his eyebrows. “What, you mean it was a manuscript on how to insert a baby into a woman?”

“Nearly. It was a procedure to surgically implant a little statue into a human body.” Crawford had had to raise his hand at that point to silence Boyd. “Let me finish. The manuscript was in a sort of abbreviated Latin, as if the surgeon who wrote it had just been making notes to himself and never expected them to be read by anyone else, and the drawings were crude, but I soon realized that it wasn’t even a woman’s body but a man’s body the thing was being put into. And yet for hundreds of years this manuscript has been catalogued as a work on caesarian delivery!”

Through the inn’s window he had seen the coach entering the yard then, and he drained his mug in several long swallows. “There’s our transport to Warnham, where we meet Appleton. Anyway,” he said as they got up and hefted their baggage, “you can see why I don’t agree that childbirthing is likely to become an orderly art any time soon.”

Crawford and Boyd had dragged their baggage out of the building and across the pavement to the coach. The horses were being changed and the driver was gone, presumably into the taproom they had just left.

“Well?” said Boyd finally. When Crawford gave him a blank look, he went on almost angrily, “So why did this Macaroni person want to put a statue inside of somebody?”

“Oh! Oh, right, of course.” Crawford had thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t know, Jack. It was seven or eight hundred years ago—probably nobody’ll ever find out. But my point was—”

“I got your point,” Boyd had assured him tiredly. “You like birthing children.”

And here his new sister-in-law was messing up the traditional fertility rituals of his wedding. Crawford smiled as Julia broke away from her father and the minister, who were talking by the drawing room window, and crossed to where he and Boyd were standing.

“Well, it was mostly traditional Scottish, dear,” she said, bending down to pick up the biscuit Josephine had left on the floor. “And it wasn’t actually an oatcake anyway—it was a Biddenden cake from just across the Weald in Kent.” She handed it to Crawford.

“I remember those, Miss—uh, Mrs. Crawford,” said Boyd, who had grown up in Sussex. “They used to be given out at Easter, didn’t they?”

“That’s right,” Julia said. “Michael, oughtn’t we tobe getting aboard Mr.—aboard your carriage and leaving? It’s getting dark, and Hastings is a few miles off.”

“You’re right.” He dropped the biscuit into his coat pocket. “And we’re supposed to be on the Calais boat by noon. I’ll begin making our goodbyes.”

Appleton and Boyd were staying on and taking separate coaches back to London tomorrow. He found them and shook their hands, smiling to conceal a sudden, momentary urge to go back with them, and to leave to braver souls the whole undertaking of marriage.

Julia had come up beside him and touched his shoulder. He nodded to his friends, then turned and took her arm and began leading her toward the front door.

The moon ducked in and out of muscular-looking clouds overhead as the landau rattled along the shore road, and a wind had sprung up that nearly drowned out the distant respiration of the waves. Crawford pulled the fur robe more tightly around Julia and himself, thankful that the carriage roof had been put up; and he was charitably hoping, as he watched the steam of his breath plume away, that the driver had had a lot of old Mr. Carmody’s brandy before they’d left.

The wildness of the night seemed to have got into the horses, for they were nearly galloping in the harnesses, their ears laid back and sparks flying from their hooves even though the road wasn’t particularly flinty—the carriage arrowed through the luckily empty streets of St. Leonards only about ten minutes after leaving Bexhill-on-Sea, and shortly after that Crawford could see the lights and buildings of Hastings ahead, and he heard the driver swearing at the horses as he worked at reining them in.

The carriage finally slowed to a stop in front of the Keller Inn, and Crawford helped Julia step down onto pavement that seemed, after the wild ride, to be rocking like the deck of a ship.

They were expected, and several young men in the inn’s livery sprinted out of the building to haul the luggage down from the boot. Crawford tried to pay for the ride, but was told that Appleton had covered it, and so he made do with tipping the driver lavishly before the man got back up onto the seat to take the carriage back to Appleton’s house in London.

Then, suddenly both impatient and self-conscious, Crawford took Julia’s elbow and followed the baggage-laden servants into the building. Several minutes later an amber glow of lamplight flared to define an upstairs window, and presently it went out.

Morning sunlight, fragmented by the warped glass of the windowpane, was spattered and streaked like a frozen fountain across the wall when Crawford was awakened by the maid’s knock. He was stiff and feverish, though he hadn’t had an appreciable amount to drink the night before, and for the first few minutes, while he was facing the sunny wall, he thought he was still in Warnham, and that it was tonight that he was supposed to get married.

Brown stains on the quilt in front of his eyes seemed to confirm it. That’s right, he thought blurrily, I went out barefoot into the muddy yard last night … and had some kind of drink-spawned hallucination, and failed to find the wedding ring. I’d better go look for it again this morning. Vaguely he wondered what the mud had consisted of—there was certainly a strange smell in the room, like the heavy odors of an operating theater.

And why were these bluish quartz crystals lying on the sheet? There must have been half a dozen of them, each as big as a sparrow’s egg. He could understand having picked them up—they were eye-catching little pebbles, knobby but bright with an amethystine glitter—but why scatter them across the bed?

The maid knocked again. With a groan he rolled over—

—And then he screamed and convulsed right out of the bed and onto the floor, and he crawled backward across the polished wood, piling up carpets at his back, until the wall stopped him, and he was still screaming with every quick breath.

The brown stains had not been mud.

His lungs were heaving inside his ribs with the stress of his inhuman shrieking, but his mind was stopped, as static as a smashed clock; and though his eyes were clenched tightly shut now, all he could see were bones jutting terribly white from torn and crushed flesh, and blood everywhere. He wasn’t Michael Crawford now, nor even a human—for an endless minute he was nothing but a crystallized knot of horror and profound denial.

He consisted of an impulse to stop existing—but the very fact of breathing linked him to the world, and the world now began to intrude. Hugely against his will he became aware of sounds again.

The maid had fled, but now there were masculine voices outside the door, which shook with knockings loud enough to be heard over Crawford’s continuing screams. Finally there was a heavy impact against the panels, and then another, and the third one splintered the door broadly enough so that an eye could peer in, and then a gnarled hand snaked through and pulled back the bolt. At last the door was swung open.

The first two men into the room rushed to the bed, but after a glance at the crushed, redly glistening ruin that had last night been Julia Crawford, they turned their stiff, pale faces toward Crawford, who had by now managed to stifle his screams by biting his fist very hard and staring at the floor.

Crawford was aware that the men had stumbled out of the room, and he could hear shouting and a racket that might have been someone being devastatingly sick. After a while men—perhaps some of the same ones—came back in.

They hastily bundled up his clothes and shoes and helped him get dressed in the hall, and then they took him—carried him, practically—downstairs to the kitchen and gave him a cup of brandy.

“We’ve sent someone to fetch the sheriff,” said one man shakily. “What in the name of Jesus happened?”

Crawford took a long sip of the liquor, and he found that he was able to think and speak. “I don’t know! “he whispered. “How could that—have happened!—while I was asleep?”

The two men looked at each other, then left him alone there.

He had known at a glance that she was dead—he had seen too many violent fatalities in the Navy to entertain any doubt—but if a body in that condition had been brought to him after a sea battle, he would have assumed that a mast section had fallen across it, or that an unmoored cannon had recoiled and crushed it against a bulkhead. What had happened to her?

Crawford recalled that one of the men who broke into the room had glanced at the ceiling, apparently half expecting to see a great gap from which some titanic piece of masonry would have fallen, but the plaster was sound, with only a few spots of blood. And how had Crawford not only come through unscratched, but slept right through it? Could he have been drugged, or knocked unconscious? As a doctor, he was unable to discover in himself the after-effects of either one.

What kind of husband sleeps through the brutal murder—and rape, possibly, though there would be no way to derive a guess about that from the devastated body upstairs—of his own wife? Hadn’t there been something about “protecting” in the vows he’d taken last night?

But how could a killer have got into the room? The door was bolted from the inside, and the window was at least a dozen feet above the pavement, and was in any case too small for even a child to crawl through … and this murder wasn’t the work of any child—Crawford estimated that it would take a strong man, even with a sledgehammer, to crush a ribcage so totally.

And how in the name of God had he slept through it?

He was unable to stop seeing that smashed horror in the bed, and he knew that it completed a triumvirate, along with the burning house in which Caroline had died and the overturned boat in the surf that had drowned his younger brother. And he knew that these things would forever be obstacles to any other subject for his attention, like rough boulders blocking the doorways and corridors of an otherwise comfortable house.

He wondered, almost objectively, whether he would find a way to avoid dying by his own hand.

He had refilled his brandy cup at least once, but now he was nauseated by the sharp fumes of it, and out of consideration for their kitchen floor—That’s good, interrupted his mind hysterically, their kitchen floor! How about the floor upstairs, and the bed and the mattress!—he decided to go outside into the garden.

The fresh sea breeze dispelled his nausea, and he walked aimlessly down the narrow, shaded lanes, trying to lose his abhorrent individuality in the vivid smells and colors of the flowers.

He put his hands into the pockets of his coat, and he felt something which, after a moment’s puzzlement, he was able to identify as the Biddenden cake Josephine had failed to break at the wedding the night before. He took it out of the pocket. There was a raised pattern on the crumbly surface and, looking closely, he saw that it was a representation of two women physically joined at the hip. Crawford had read of twins who’d been born so, though he didn’t know why the town of Biddenden should celebrate one such pair on their biscuits. He crumbled the thing up in his hands and scattered it over the path for the birds.

After a while he began to walk back toward where the rear wall of the inn rose above the greenery, but he halted when he heard voices behind a hedge ahead of him, for he didn’t want to have to talk to anyone.

“What do you mean, ‘should have restrained him'?” came a man’s voice angrily. “I’m not a member of the Watch—and anyway, nobody would have guessed that he could walk away. We carried him down the stairs to the kitchen.” “Murderers are generally good actors,” said another voice.

Crawford was suddenly dizzy with rage, and actually reeled back a step; he took a deep breath, but before he could shout he heard another voice say, “Did you hear how his first wife died?"—and he sagged and let the breath out.

CHAPTER 3

I will drain him dry as hay:

Sleep shall neither night nor day

Hang upon his pent-house lid;

He shall live a man forbid:

Weary se’nnights nine times nine

Shall he dwindle, peak and pine:

Though his bark cannot be lost,

Yet he shall be tempest-tost.

—Shakespeare, Macbeth

“First wife? No. How did you?”

“The father and sister of the dead woman upstairs got here a few minutes ago—they’re in the dining room. They say his first wife ran off with a Navy man who got her with child, and Crawford found out about it and burned down the house she was living in. Her Navy man tried to get into the burning house to save her, but Crawford fought him, on the street out front, long enough to make it impossible for anyone to get inside.”

Crawford’s eyes and jaws and fists were all clenched tight, and he had to crouch to keep from falling over. He could hear the blood pressure singing in his head.

“Jesus,” said the first man. “And did you see what he did to the Carmody girl upstairs? Like a mill wheel rolled over her. And then he went back to sleep! The doctor says, judging from her temperature and the way the blood’s dried, that she was killed around midnight. So old Crawford was sleeping there next to that thing for something like seven hours!”

“I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not searching this damn garden without a pistol in my hand.”

“That’s a point. Yeah, let’s …”

The voices drifted away then. Crawford sat down in the grass and held his head in his hands. These people were so wrong, about so many things, that he despaired of ever getting it all straightened out … but the worst of it was that Mr. Carmody apparently believed that old story about Caroline’s death.

It had been about six years ago—Caroline had left him, but though he had known which house she was living in in London, he hadn’t been able to work up the nerve to go and confront her; it was too much like making a perilous leap from one high rooftop to another—an error would be fatal. He might simply fall, simply ruin any possibility that she would come back to him … for there would be only one chance, she wouldn’t feel that she owed him more than one conversation.

And so for ten days he had ignored his medical practice to sit all day in a pub across the street from the house she was in, trying to judge the perfect moment to see her and ask her to return.

And before he did, the place had caught fire. Crawford thought now that the Navy man might have set it intentionally when he’d learned—when he had got the impression—that she was pregnant.

When smoke had begun gouting out of the upstairs windows, Crawford had dropped his beer and sprinted out of the pub and across the street, and he’d been slamming his shoulder against the front door when the sailor had opened it from inside, to come lurching and coughing out in a cloud of acrid smoke. Crawford had bulled past him, shouting “Caroline!"—but the sailor had caught him by the collar and whirled him back outside.

“Hopeless,” the man had wheezed at him. “Only be killin’ yourself.”

But Crawford had heard a scream from inside. “That’s my wife,” he gasped, tearing away from the sailor.

He had taken only one running step back toward the house when a hard punch to the kidney brought him to his knees; but when the Navy man grabbed him under the arms to haul him out onto the street, Crawford drove an elbow, with as much force as he could muster, back into the man’s crotch.

The sailor collapsed forward, and Crawford caught his arm and spun him out into the street, where he fell and rolled moaning in the dust. Crawford turned back toward the open door, but at that moment the upper floor gave way and crashed down into the ground floor, exploding out through the doorway such a burst of sparks and heat that Crawford was lifted off his feet and tossed right over the hunched sailor.

His eyebrows and a lot of his hair were gone, and his clothing would have been aflame in moments if someone had not flung on him the contents of a pail of water that had been brought to douse the wall of one of the surrounding houses.

The fire was officially declared an accident, but rumors—and even a couple of street ballads—hinted that Crawford had set it in revenge, and then prevented the Navy man from getting inside to rescue Caroline. Crawford thought the sailor himself might have started the rumors, for a couple of the onlookers at the fire had remarked acidly on his hasty solo escape.

And this thing now was far, far worse. Of course people will take it for granted that I killed Julia, he thought. They won’t listen to me. And already errors have begun to creep into the story—such as the doctor’s statement that she died at around midnight. I know she was still alive at dawn. I remember drowsily making love to her while the curtains were just beginning to lighten; she was straddling me, sitting on top of me, and while I don’t know if I ever did wake up fully, I know I didn’t dream it.

I can either stay, and be arrested, and almost certainly hang … or I can run, leave the country. Of course, if I run, everybody will conclude that I did kill her, but I don’t think my voluntary submission to arrest and trial would make them think any differently.

All I can do, he thought, is run.

He felt better after deciding; at least now he had a clear goal, and something to think about besides Julia’s intolerably sundered body.

He stood up cautiously—and instantly there was a shout and the stunning bam of a gunshot, and a tree branch beside his head exploded in stinging splinters.

And then Crawford was running, back through the lanes of the garden, toward the back wall. Another shot boomed behind him and his left hand was whiplashed upward, spraying blood across his eyes, but he leaped, caught the wall with his right hand, and contorted his body up and outward through empty air; a moment later he hit rocky dirt hard on his side, but as soon as he had stopped sliding he made himself roll back up onto his feet and hobble down a slope to a rutted, building-shaded alley.

Only when he saw the man on the horse at the street end of the alley did he realize that he had picked up a fist-sized stone, and almost without volition his arm drew back to fling it with all his remaining strength.

But, “Michael!” the man called softly in a familiar voice, and Crawford dropped the stone.

“My God,” he gasped haltingly, limping forward with wincing haste, “you’ve got to … get me out of here! They think …”

“I know what they think,” said Apple ton, swinging down out of the saddle. “Can you—” he began, but then he looked at Crawford more closely. “Good heavens, are you shot?”

“Just my hand.” Crawford now looked at it for the first time, and his pupils contracted with shock. The index and little fingers looked flayed, but his ring finger was gone, along with his wedding ring, leaving only a ragged, glistening stump from which blood was falling rapidly to make bright red spots on the dirt and the toes of his boots.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, suddenly wobbly on his legs. “Jesus, man, look what …”

His eyes unfocussed, but before he could fall, Appleton stepped forward and slapped him across the face twice, forehand and backhand. “Faint later,” he said harshly. “Right now you’ve got to ride or die. Tourniquet that as soon as you’re beyond pursuit—there’s fifty pounds and a note in the saddlebag, but it seems that what you’ll need soonest is the string I tied around them. Foresightful of me to have used it, eh?”

Voices could be heard shouting on the far side of the wall, and somewhere hooves were knocking on cobblestones. Appleton gave the ashen Crawford a leg up into the saddle, clearly half expecting him to tumble right back to the ground on the other side of the horse.

But Crawford took the reins in his right hand, kicked his boots into the stirrups, pushed his heels down to be able to grip the horse, and, when Appleton gave the horse a loud slap across the thigh, he hunched forward as his mount sprang away west down the broad Hastings street in the morning sunlight. He clamped his teeth on the stump of his missing finger and worked very hard at not being violently sick.

Only the highest chimney-pots still glowed in the reddening sunlight as the stagecoach lurched and lunged its slow way up the crowded length of Borough High Street in London, and when it stopped in front of an inn near the new Marshalsea Prison, Crawford was the first passenger to alight from the carriage.

In a back corner of a Brighton tavern at midmorning he had tied a clean cloth around his finger-stump and then drenched it in brandy before gingerly pulling on a pair of gloves. Now, after more riding and no rest and finally, after abandoning the exhausted horse, six straight hours jammed between two fat women in the London coach, he was obviously fevered—his hand was throbbing like a blacksmith’s bellows, and his breathing was hotly metallic and echoing in his head.

He had used some of Appleton’s money to buy clothes and a new leather portmanteau to carry them in, and though it was light luggage compared to what he had left behind in the Hastings hotel room, he had to repress a groan when he picked it up from where the coachman had casually set it down.

As he walked away up High Street he stayed in the shadows under the overhanging second stories of the old half-timbered houses, for he was nervous about all the prisons around him. Ahead of him to the left, on the Thames bank, stood the burned-out ruin of the famous Clink, and behind him, just south of the new prison where the stage had stopped, was the King’s Bench Prison. Why the hell, he thought peevishly, didn’t Appleton think of the alarming nature of this area, and send me somewhere else?

The Borough’s many sewage ditches always smelled horrible, but after this hot summer day the fumes seemed to hint at some sort of cloacal fermentation, and he worried about compounding his fever in the bad air. At least it was medical students he was going to stay with.

The street was clogged with homeward-bound costermonger carts, every one of which seemed to have a dog riding on top, but soon he could see, over them, the arch of London Bridge—and remembering the instructions in Appleton’s note, he turned right down the last street before the bridge. He turned right again at the next corner, and found himself, as the note had said, on Dean Street. He walked down to the narrow house that was number eight—it was right across the street from a Baptist chapel, another dubious omen—and obediently rattled the doorknocker. A headache had begun behind his eyes, and he was sweating heavily under his coat.

As he waited on the cobblestones, he mentally reviewed Appleton’s note. “Pretend to be a Medical Student,” Appleton had written. “You’re a bit old, but there are older. Be frankish about your Navy experience, for you could have been a Dresser to a Naval Surgeon without getting any Credentials, but be vague about questions touching on whose Lectures you are attending. It’s unlikely that you will be recognized, but of course don’t talk about Obstetrics. Henry Stephens will not press you for Answers once he knows that you are a Friend of mine, Nor will he let others do so.”

The door was pulled open by a sturdy young man who was shorter than Crawford. Crawford thought he looked more like a laborer than a medical student. His reddish-brown hair had obviously been pushed back from his forehead only a moment before.

“Yes?” the young man said.

“Is,” said Crawford hoarsely, “uh, Henry Stephens at home?”

“Not at the moment. Can I be of any help?”

“Well … a friend of his told me I might be able to get a room here.” Crawford leaned against the doorframe and tried not to pant. “Help pay for the joint sitting room, I think it was.” His voice was hollow and rasping from his screaming this morning.

“Oh.” The young man stared at him for a moment, then swung the door open. “Uh, do come in. Tyrrell moved out a week ago, I guess you heard, and we could use the help. You’re,” he said dubiously, “another medical student?”

“That’s right.” Crawford stepped forward into the warmth and lamplight, and sank into a chair and began pulling off his gloves. “My name is—” Belatedly he wondered what name to give. His mind was a blank—all he could remember was that in the note Appleton had said Be frankish. “—Michael Frankish.”

The young man seemed to find the name plausible. He held out his hand. “I’m John Keats—currently a student at Guy’s Hospital, right around the corner. Are you at Guy’s?”

“Uh, no, I’m at … St. Thomas’s.” He was pleased with himself for having remembered the name of the hospital across the street from Guy’s.

Keats noticed the dark bandage on the stump of Crawford’s finger then, and it seemed to upset him. “What—your finger! What happened?”

A little flustered, Crawford said, “Oh, it—had to be amputated. Gangrene.”

Keats stared at him anxiously for a moment. “I gather you had a rough trip,” he ventured finally as he closed the door. “Would a glass of wine sit well?”

“Sit like corn upon the head of Solomon,” said Crawford, too tired to bother with making sense. “Yes,” he added, seeing Keats’s bewildered look. “What area of medicine are you studying?” he went on hastily, speaking more loudly as Keats went into the next room.

“Surgical and apothecary,” came the answer. A moment later Keats reappeared with a half-full bottle and two glasses. “I’m going to the Apothecaries’ Hall this Thursday to take the examinations, though I won’t be able to practice until the thirty-first of October.”

Crawford took a filled glass and drank deeply. “What, Hallowe’en? I thought you said surgical, not witchcraftical.”

Keats laughed uncertainly, the look of anxiety returning to his face. “I become of age then; the thirty-first is my birthday. My—” He paused, for Crawford was staring at several knobby little bluish crystals on a bookshelf.

“What,” asked Crawford carefully, “are those?”

A key rattled in the front door lock then, and a tall man opened the door and entered. He didn’t look as young as Keats, and his face was leanly humorous.

“Henry!” exclaimed the younger man with obvious relief. “This is Michael … Myrrh? …”

“Michael, uh, Frankish,” Crawford corrected, standing up but not really looking away from the little crystals. Their facets made bright needles of the lamplight, and seemed to increase the fever pressure behind his forehead. “Arthur Appleton … told me to look here for a place to stay. I’m a student at St. Elmo’s.” He shook his head sharply. “Thomas’s, that is.” He coughed.

Henry Stephens gave him a good-naturedly skeptical smile, but just nodded. “If Arthur vouches for you, that’s good enough for me. You can—what, are you off, John?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Keats, taking a coat from a rack by the door. “Got to see to Dr. Lucas’s poor charges. Good to have met you, Michael,” he added on the way out the door.

When the door had closed, Stephens sank into a chair and picked up the wine glass Keats had left. “St. Elmo’s, eh?”

Though exhausted, Crawford smiled and changed the subject. “Dr. Lucas’s charges?”

Stephens bowed a fraction of an inch. “Young John is a dresser for the most incompetent surgeon at Guy’s—Lucas’s dressers always have plenty of festering bandages to change.”

Crawford waved at the odd crystals. “What are those?”

Stephens may have realized that Crawford’s casual manner was a pose, for he looked sharply at him before answering. “Those are bladder stones,” he said carefully. “Dr. Lucas is given many such cases.”

“I’ve seen bladder stones,” said Crawford. “That’s not how they look. They look like … spiky limestone. These things look like quartz.”

Stephens shrugged. “These are what gets cut out of Lucas’s patients. No doubt they’re tired of it—any day now I expect the administrators to summon Lucas and tell him, ‘Doctor, you’re beginning to exhaust our patients!'” Stephens leaned back in his chair and chuckled quietly for several moments. Then he had a sip of wine and went on. “Keats isn’t a brilliant student, you know. The boys assigned to Lucas never are. But nevertheless Keats is … perhaps more observant than the administrators guess.”

Crawford knew he was missing something. “Well …” he said, trying to keep his eyes focussing, “why has he saved the things?”

Stephens shook his head in humorous but apparently genuine disappointment. “Damn, for a moment I thought you might know, you were looking at them so intently! I don’t know … but I remember one time he was playing with them, holding them up to the light and all, and he said, mostly to himself, ‘I should throw these away—I know I can have my real career even without using them.'”

Crawford had another sip of wine and yawned. “So what’s his real career? Jewellery?”

“Nasty sort of jewellery that’d be, wouldn’t it? No.” He looked at Crawford with raised eyebrows. “No, he wants to be a poet.”

Crawford was nearly asleep, and he knew that when he slept it would be for a good twelve hours, so he asked Stephens which room would be his, and when he was shown it he threw his portmanteau onto the floor. He fetched his drink, and stood for a moment in the hall and swirled the inch of wine in the bottom of the glass.

“So,” he asked Stephens, who had helped him carry blankets from the linen closet, “what’s poetry got to do with bladder stones?”

“Don’t ask me,” Stephens told him. “I’m not on intimate terms with the Muses.”

At first he thought the woman in his dream was Julia, for even in the dimness—were the two of them in a cave?—he could see the silver of antimony around her eyes, and Julia had whitened her eyebrows with antimony for the wedding. But when she stood up, naked, and walked across the floor tiles toward him, he saw that this was someone else.

Moonlight climbed a white thigh as she padded past a window or cleft in the cave wall, and he smelled night-blooming jasmine and the sea; then she was in his arms and he was kissing her passionately, not caring that her smooth skin was as cool as the stone tiles under his bare feet, nor that there was suddenly in his nostrils an alien muskiness.

Then they were rolling on the tiles, and it was not skin under his sliding fingertips but scales, and he didn’t care about that either … but a moment later the dream shifted, and they were in a forest clearing where the moon made spots of pale light that winked like spinning silver coins as the branches overhead waved in a Mediterranean wind … she slithered out of his embrace and disappeared in the underbrush, and though he crawled after her, calling, unmindful of the thorny branches, the rustling of her passage grew steadily more distant and was soon gone.

But something seemed to be answering his call—or was he answering a call of its? As in many dreams, identities blurred into one another … and then he was looking at a mountain, and though he’d never been there, he knew it was one of the Alps. It seemed miles high, blocking out a whole corner of the sky even though the thin clouds streaking its breast with sunset shadow let him know that it was many miles distant—and, in spite of its broad-shouldered, strong-jawed look, he knew it was female.

Pain in the stump of his missing finger woke him before dawn.

Two mornings later he was scuffing his way up the broad front steps of Guy’s Hospital, blinking at the Greek-looking pillars that stretched away overhead from the top of the front door arch to the roof two stories above; but the sunlight seemed too harsh up there among all that smooth stone, and he let his gaze drop back down to the heels of Keats’s boots, which were tapping up the steps just ahead of him.

For the last couple of days he had been attending lectures at both Guy’s and St. Thomas’s, confident that he would be able to get Appleton to acknowledge the signature he had forged on his application papers—if Crawford should decide to make it official and actually become a surgeon again under the name of Michael Frankish.

And he was fairly sure he wouldn’t be recognized. For one thing, Dr. Crawford had always worked in hospitals north of the river and, for another, he no longer looked very much like Dr. Crawford—he had recently worked very hard to lose weight so as to look his best at the wedding, and he now found himself losing more, involuntarily; and nobody who had known him a week ago would have described him as hollow-cheeked and sunken-eyed, as he certainly was now.

At the top of the steps Keats paused and frowned back at Crawford. “Are you sure you’re not too sick?”

“I’m fine.” Crawford fished a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. He was dizzy, and it occurred to him that Newton must have been right when he’d said that light consisted of particles, for today he could feel them hitting him. He wondered if he was going to faint. “What have you got today—Theory and Practice of Medicine?”

“No,” Keats said, “this morning I’m helping out in the cutting wards—people recovering from lithotomies.”

“Mind if I … follow along?” asked Crawford, attempting a carefree smile. “I’m supposed to hear about Anatomy from old Ashley, but he’ll just put me to sleep. And I’m sure I’d pick up more real acquaintance with the subject by touring the wards than by sitting through a damn lecture anyway.”

Keats looked uncertain, then grinned. “You were a surgeon’s dresser on shipboard, didn’t you say? Sure, you’ll be used to dealing with much worse than this. Come along.” He held the door open for Crawford. “Matter of fact, I’m taking the exam tomorrow, and then leaving for two months at Margate—you might very well be my successor with Dr. Lucas, so it’s only right that I show you around.”

They reported to the senior surgeon, who didn’t even look up when told that Michael Frankish was to be Lucas’s new dresser; he just gave Crawford an entry certificate and told him to use the boot-scraper before going upstairs to the wards.

It took a little over an hour to tend to all of Dr. Lucas’s patients.

As a student Crawford had not minded tending to the people recovering from surgeries in the cutting wards; the operating theater itself was far worse, a horrifying pandemonium in which burly interns struggled to hold some screaming patient down on the table as the surgeon sweated and cursed and dug with the knife, his shoes scuffing streaks in the bloody sand on the floor as he braced himself for each resisted thrust … and just as nightmarish, if quieter, were the “salivating” wards, where syphilitics drooled helplessly as a result of the mercurial ointment rubbed into their open lesions … but the cutting wards were where a student could see healing actually occurring, quietly, day by day.

Dr. Lucas’s cutting wards were different. After changing the first heavily slick, malodorous bandages, Crawford could see that Stephens had not understated the old surgeon’s skill—Crawford had never seen clumsier incisions, and it was clear that at least as many would die of the bladder-stone operation as benefit from it.

A gray-haired clergyman was on his knees beside one of the last beds they came to, and he looked up when Keats bent over the patient. The old cleric seemed to have been deep in prayer, for it took several seconds for his eyes to focus on the newcomers, and even then all he managed to do was nod and turn away.

“Excuse me, Reverend,” said Keats, “got to change the bandages.”

The clergyman bobbed his head and backed away from the bed, and he thrust his hands inside his cassock—but not before Crawford noticed blood on his fingers. Puzzled, Crawford looked up at his face, and saw the man quickly lick his upper lip—had there been blood there too?

The minister met his gaze for a moment, and the old face tightened with some emotion like hate or envy; one of the bloody hands emerged from the robe for a moment with the ring finger folded inside the fist, and then a spotted finger pointed at Crawford’s own left hand. The old man mimed spitting at Crawford, then turned and scuttled out of the room.

Keats was leaning closer to the figure in the bed, and now he reached over and opened one of the eyes. “This one’s dead,” he said, softly so as not to alarm the patients in beds nearby. “Could you find a nurse? Tell her to fetch a doctor and the porter so we can get this into the charnel house.”

Crawford’s heart was beating fast. “My God, John, that minister had blood on his hands! And he gave me the most horrible look before he ran out of here.” He waved at the corpse in the bed. “Do you think …?”

Keats stared at him, and stared off the way the old man had gone, and then grabbed the blankets and pulled them down to peer at the diaper-like bandage; in that instant Crawford thought Keats looked older than the clergyman had. After a few moments Keats spoke. “He didn’t kill him, no,” he said quietly. “But he was … looting the body. The blood of … certain patients has a … certain value. I’m fairly sure he wasn’t a real minister, and I’ll see to it that he’s kept out in the future—let him go haunt the wards at St. George’s.” He waved at Crawford. “So get the nurse.”

Though both disgusted and intrigued by Keats’s words, Crawford’s mood as he walked down the hall was one of dour amusement at being ordered around a hospital by a twenty-year-old … but his amusement turned to incredulous horror when he started down the stairs.

A nurse was walking stiffly up the stairs, and he had raised his hand to get her attention, but when she looked up he recognized her. It was Josephine Carmody, apparently deep in her mechanical persona.

His hand paused only a moment, then went on up to scratch his scalp as if he had never intended the gesture to be a wave, and he lowered his eyes and moved to pass her. His heart was thudding hollowly, and he felt drunk with panic.

She was too close to him when she drew the pistol from under her blouse, and instead of shoving the muzzle into his ear, she only managed to slam the flesh-warmed barrel against the back of his neck. She took a step back to get a clear shot.

Crawford yelled in alarm and swung his right fist hard up against her gun hand.

Breath whistled through her teeth and the pistol flew out of her grasp, but it clanked against the wall and then tumbled down three steps and Josephine dove after it.

Crawford didn’t think he could get to her before she could come up with it, so he went clattering back up the stairs in a half-crawl. She didn’t shoot, but he could hear her clump-clumping up after him, and somehow her imperturbable clockwork stride was more terrifying than the pistol. He was whimpering as he ran back down the hall to the room in which Keats waited for him.

Keats looked up in surprise when Crawford came lurching back into the windowless ward. “Did you find a—” he began.

“Quick, John,” Crawford interrupted, “how can I get out of here besides by the stairs?"—but the metronomic clumping had reached the floor they were on. “Jesus!” he said shrilly, and ran back out into the hall.

Josephine was standing ten yards away, pointing the pistol straight at him. He sat down and threw an arm across his face, hoping she’d fire quickly and not take time to aim—and then something burst out of the ward doorway to his right.

The gun boomed and flashed, and he wasn’t hit. He lowered his hands——and saw a glittering thing like a rainbow-colored serpent curling its heavy, scaled body in the air between him and Josephine; he was dazedly trying to make out whether it had wings that were beating too fast to see, like a hummingbird, or was hanging from some kind of spiderweb, when it simply disappeared.

The hallway’s stale air shook, and Crawford shivered in a sudden impossibly icy draft.

Josephine was staring wide-eyed at the space where the thing had been, and when she turned and ran back to the stairs it was with an animal grace that was the very opposite of her mechanical pose.

Keats was beside Crawford. “Get in here,” he was saying harshly, “and deny having seen anything.” He dragged Crawford back into the ward, where the patients were querulously demanding to know what was going on and who would carry them to safety if the building was under attack by Frenchmen. Keats told them that a nurse had gone mad and fired a pistol, and to Crawford’s surprise that explanation seemed to calm them.

“Act stupid,” Keats whispered. “They’ll assume you are anyway, to be assigned to Lucas. Tell them this fellow"—he waved at the corpse in the bed—"was this way when we got here.”

Crawford was about to protest that the patient really had been dead when they’d arrived, but before he could speak he looked down at the figure in the bed.

The body was collapsed, like a trolling net with the stiffening hoops taken out of it, and the mouth was now gaping and charred and toothless. When Crawford looked up, Keats was staring at him coldly.

“Your … rescuer … came out of that,” Keats said. “If the old scavenger in the clergyman suit hadn’t drained off some of the potency first, the thing probably would have killed that woman, in addition to stopping her shot.”

CHAPTER 4

The stones …

Began to lose their hardness, to soften, slowly,

To take on form, to grow in size, a little,

Become less rough, to look like human beings,

Or anyway as much like human beings

As statues do, when the sculptor is only starting,

Images half blocked out….

–Ovid, Metamorphoses

Taking Keats’s advice, Crawford thickened his voice a little and let his mouth tend to hang open when they were questioned by the senior surgeon; total bewilderment he didn’t have to feign, nor a tendency to jump at any sudden motions around him. The senior surgeon told them that the nurse who had fired the gun had fled the hospital, so Crawford was able to say that he’d never seen her before and had no idea what she had hoped to accomplish. The condition of the corpse in the hospital bed was blamed on the ricocheted pistol ball, and it required an acting ability Crawford hadn’t known he possessed to nod and agree that that sounded likely.

Keats was through for the day, and Crawford knew that his own days as a medical student were over now that Josephine had somehow found him, and so the two of them walked homeward together up Dean Street. Men were unloading bales of old clothes from several wagons by the south corner of St. Thomas’s Hospital, and the yells from the vehicles of the merchants and cabbies blocked behind them were almost drowned out by the clamor of the dozen boys and dogs playing around the halted wheels, and for several minutes as Keats and Crawford shouldered their way through the crowd neither of them spoke.

Finally they were past the worst of the noise, and Crawford said, “John, what was that thing? That flying snake?”

Keats seemed bitterly amused. “Are you really trying to tell me you don’t know?”

Crawford thought about it. “Yes,” he said.

Keats stopped and stared at him, obviously angry. “How is that possible? How the hell much do you expect me to believe? Am I supposed to think, for instance, that your finger was really amputated because of gangrene?”

In spite of the fact that Keats was shorter than he and fourteen years his junior, Crawford stepped back and raised his hands placatingly. “That was a lie, I admit it.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to share any of his recent personal history with Keats, so he tried to change the subject. “You know, that fake priest was staring at my … at where my finger used to be.” He shook his head in puzzlement. “It seemed to make him … angry.”

“I daresay. Can you really not know about all this? He thought you were there for the same reason he was, and he was angry because you pretty clearly didn’t need to be anymore.”

“He was—what the devil are you saying, that he was there to get a finger amputated? And jealous because I’m missing one? John, I’m sorry, but this doesn’t even—”

“Let’s not talk about it in the street.” Keats thought for a moment, then looked hard at Crawford. “Have you ever been to the Galatea, under the bridge?”

“Galatea? No. Is that a tavern? It sounds as if …” He let the sentence go, for he’d been about to say as if the barmaids are living statues. Instead he said, “Why is it under the bridge?”

Keats had already started walking forward. “For the same reason that trolls hang about under bridges,” he called back over his shoulder.

The Galatea was indeed a tavern under London Bridge. After shuffling down a set of stone steps to the narrow river shore—into the shadows of the beached coal barges, where the two of them picked their way over unconscious drunkards and piles of rotting river weed—they stepped into the dank darkness under the bridge, and at one point even had to shuffle single file along a foot-wide ledge over the water, and Crawford wondered if there was another entrance for deliveries or if all the food and drink was delivered to the front door by boat.

They passed the place’s warped windows before they got to the door; lamplight made luminous amber blobs in the crude glass, and it occurred to Crawford that sunlight must never get this far in under the wide stone belly of the bridge overhead. Nine tiny lamps burned over the door, and Crawford wondered if they might be just the remainders of a pattern of now mostly missing lights, for

their positions—four in a cluster, then two, then three—seemed intentional.

Keats was in front, and pushed open the door and disappeared inside. When Crawford followed him in, he saw that there was no consistent floor to the place—every table was on its own shoulder or slab or projection of primordial masonry, connected by stairs and ladders to its neighbors, and each of the half-dozen oil lamps hung from the ceiling on a chain of unique length. Considering the place’s location, Crawford wasn’t surprised that it smelled of wet clay.

There were only a few customers huddled down there on this summer morning, and Keats led Crawford past them, in a winding, climbing course, to a table on an ancient pedestal in what Crawford assumed must have been the back of the place. One of the lamps swung in a subterranean breeze a couple of yards above the scarred black tabletop, but the shadows were impenetrable around them as they sat down.

“Wine?” suggested Keats with incongruous cheer. “Here you can get it served in an amethyst goblet—the ancient Greeks believed that wine lost its power to intoxicate if it were served that way. Lord Byron used to drink wine out of an amethyst skull.”

“I read about that—but it was just a skull, I think, a plain old bone one,” said Crawford, refusing to be intimidated by Keats’s manner. “A monk’s, I believe. He dug it up in his garden. And yes, wine would be just the thing on a day like this—sherry, if they’ve got a thick, strengthening one here.”

A big, moustached man in an apron climbed up beside Keats and smiled at the two of them; Crawford guessed that he had grown the moustache to partially conceal the no doubt cancerous bump that disfigured his jaw. “Well now, look who we have here!” the man exclaimed. “After some company, are you, my men? Neffy on this fine day? I’m not sure who’s around right now, but there’ll certainly be several who’ll pay for—”

“Have you met my friend?” interrupted Keats. “Mike Frankish, Pete Barker.”

Barker bowed slightly. “Anyone who can persuade Mr. Keats to grace my estab—”

“Just drinks,” interrupted Keats. “An oloroso sherry for my friend, and I’ll have a glass of the house claret.”

The man’s smile remained mockingly knowing, but he repeated their orders and went away.

“He didn’t know you.” Keats sounded thoughtful. “And Barker knows all the neff-hosts in London.”

“What is that, and why did you think I was one?”

The drinks arrived then, and Keats waited until Barker had climbed away into the darkness again. “Oh, you are one, Mike, or you’d be gripping the sides of the operating table right now while some doctor probed your abdomen for that pistol ball. But I knew it when I first saw you. There’s no mistaking the mark—kind of an ill look about you that’s all in the eyes. At first. Clearly you only became one recently—you couldn’t live with the mark on you in any city for very long without noticing the kind of attention you’d be drawing—and anyway your finger still hasn’t healed, and their bites heal quickly.”

“It wasn’t bitten off, damn it,” Crawford said. “It was shot off.”

Keats smiled. “I’m sure it seemed that way. Try telling that to the neffers, though—the people you’ll be meeting who live the neffer life.”

More mystified than ever, Crawford drank some of the syrupy sherry and then set the glass down hard. “What,” he said levelly, ignoring a faintly echoing groan from the darkness behind him, “is that?”

Keats spread his hands and opened his mouth to speak, then after a moment exhaled and grinned. “A sexual perversion, actually. More often than not, anyway. According to the police, it’s a taste for congress with certain sorts of deformed people, like Barker there with his big jaw. According to its devotees, though, it’s the pursuit of … succubae, Lamiae.”

Crawford was both unhappy and amused. “So I’m the sort who’d mistake Barker for a beautiful female vampire, am I? Goddammit, John—”

“No, you’re not one of the pursuers.” He sighed. “The problem is that there aren’t any pure-bred lamiae, pure-bred vampires, anymore.” He squinted at Crawford. “Hardly any, that is. And so people nearly always make do with remote descendants of that race. And it’s generally some sort of … tumor … that distinguishes such. The tumor is the evidence—the substance, in fact—of the kinship.”

“And just knowing that some person, like your man Barker there, is descended from Lilith or somebody is enough to make him irresistible to these deviates? I swear to you, John—”

Keats overrode him. “The thing that blocked that pistol shot this morning was no half-breed. That was the most … poisonously beautiful example I’ve ever seen, and there are wealthy neffers that would get you a baronetcy and a manor and lands in exchange for just half an hour with it, even if they knew it would kill them.” He shook his head almost enviously. “How on earth did you meet it?”

“Hell, man, you were there; it jumped out of that dead lad’s throat, you said.”

“No, it was able to use him as a … a channel, because he was one of the people with a trace of their stony blood—or, conceivably, a victim of one such—but it came because it knew you.” He stopped, staring up into the darkness, then went on in a whisper. “Knew you and felt some obligation to you, as if you were … an actual member of the family, not just prey, like what the patrons of the Galatea would love to be. How did it happen? When did she bite off—” He smiled. “Shoot off your finger?”

“I never saw the thing before, honestly. And the finger was shot off by some man in Sussex. He didn’t look like a vampire.”

Keats looked skeptical.

“Damn it, I’m telling the truth! And how do you happen to know all this stuff, anyway? Are you a snarfie?”

The young man’s smile was like smiles Crawford had seen by firelight aboard battle-locked ships at night, on the faces of young sailors who had survived much already and hoped to survive until dawn. “I guess maybe I am. I’m told I have the look, and the old habitués here think I’m very priggish to avoid this place, not give them the benefit of my situation. But if I am one, it was a consequence of my birth, and no choice of mine; I’m a … what, a pursuee rather than a pursuer. I’m pretty certain you are too.”

Keats stood up. “Ready to go? Come on, then. This is a good place to be out of.” He threw down some coins and started toward the ladder closest to the distant gray glow that was the front windows.

A groan echoed hollowly from the other direction, from the dark depths of the place; glancing that way, Crawford thought he saw a cluster of figures around the foot of a cross, and he hesitantly took a step toward them.

Keats caught him by the arm. “No, St. Michael,” he said softly. “Anyone who’s here is here voluntarily.”

After a few seconds Crawford shrugged and followed him.

Lamplight fell across Crawford’s eyes as he blundered past one table, and the elderly man sitting at it stared at Crawford for a moment—and then bit one of his fingers, struggled out of his seat and followed Crawford all the way to the door, whining like a begging dog and waving his bleeding hand enticingly.

Back up at street level, Crawford’s nervousness only increased. He was fairly sure Josephine hadn’t followed them from the hospital, but she might well have given up on the idea of personal revenge and gone to the authorities, who could easily find out where he lived from the hospital records. Sheriffs might be waiting for him at the Dean Street house right now.

He was wondering how fully he could trust Keats when Keats spoke. “Since you haven’t even referred to it, I guess you knew the nurse.”

Deciding to trust the boy brought no feeling of relief. “Yes. She’s my sister-in-law. She thinks I murdered my wife Saturday night.” He peered ahead nervously. “Could we walk along the bankside to the west?”

Keats had his hands in his pockets and was staring at the pavement, and for several seconds he didn’t answer. Then he squinted up at Crawford; it wasn’t quite a smile. “Very well,” he said quietly. “We could have a beer at Kusiak’s—

it’s your round, and I have the feeling I’d better get it while I can.”

They dodged across High Street between the jostling wagons, slowing again when they were under the overhang of the houses on the west side of the street. “She seems fairly sure of it,” Keats remarked when they were walking down one of the narrow streets that paralleled the river. “Your sister-in-law, that is.” The old housefronts to their right were bright with sunlight, and Crawford led Keats along on the left side of the street.

“Everybody is. That’s how I lost my finger, actually—somebody shot at me while I was running.” Crawford shook his head. “We, she and I, were in a locked room with a tiny window, and when I woke up in the morning, Julia—that’s my wife, or was—was—”

Abruptly he was crying quietly as he walked along, not even sure why, for he knew now that he hadn’t really loved Julia; he quickly turned his face toward the doors and brick walls and windows that were passing at his left, hoping that somehow Keats wouldn’t notice. Behind one of the windows a fat merchant met his tear-blurred gaze and wheeled around in alarm to look at the far doorway of his office, evidently supposing that Crawford had seen something lamentable behind him.

“Not tuberculosis, I gather,” said Keats in a casual tone, looking ahead attentively for Kusiak’s. “More often than not it’s tuberculosis, or something so close to it that the doctors don’t bother to look further. That’s how my mother went.” He was walking faster, and Crawford had to blink his eyes and hurry to keep up. “It had been coming on for years. I … knew it was my fault even when I was a child—when I was five I stood outside her bedroom door with an old sword, trying to keep out a thing I’d dreamt about. It wasn’t the fact of its being a sword so much, I remember, as the fact that it was iron. Didn’t do any good, though.” He stopped, and when he wheeled around there were tears in his eyes too. “So don’t assume that I agree with your sister-in-law,” he said angrily. Crawford nodded and sniffed. “Right.”

“What are your plans?”

Crawford shrugged. “I thought I could become a surgeon again under the name Frankish—my real name is Crawford, and I’m—”

“Crawford the accoucheur? I’ve heard of you.”

“But that plan went to hell when Josephine recognized me. The sister-in-law. I suppose she’s been doing nurse work at several London hospitals in case I might try getting back into medicine. So I guess I’ll leave England. No court would judge me innocent if it came to a murder trial.”

Keats nodded. “Damn few neffers in the judiciary … that would admit to their knowledge, anyway. Here’s Kusiak’s.”

The inn they had arrived at was a broad, two-story place with a stable at the side and a dock out back so that patrons could arrive by boat; Keats led the way into the taproom, which, with its oak panelling and leather-upholstered chairs, was a reassuring contrast to Galatea’s. Crawford hoped he didn’t still smell of the place.

“You … said you thought you were to blame for your mother’s death,” he said when they had found a table by a window that overlooked the river. “How is that? And does that mean I’m responsible for Julia’s?”

“Jesus, man, I don’t know. If so, it was obviously unintentional on your part. I think there’s a number of ways these things can attach themselves to people, but only most of them involve the people’s actual consent. In my case I’m pretty sure it was because of the night on which I was born. I think the things can get at infants born on the night of the thirty-first of October—some normal protection is missing on that night, and if you’re born then you’re … honorary family to these things. You’re adopted. They can … focus their attention on such a newborn, and then, once they’ve focussed on anyone, they seem to keep track of him throughout his life. And keep track, keep disastrous track, of his family, too. A glass of claret, please,” he added to the aproned girl who had walked up to the table.

“And a pint of bitter,” added Crawford.

“Do you have a family?” Keats asked when the girl had walked away toward the bar. A river beer-seller’s bell could be heard ringing far out across the water.

Crawford thought of the foundered boat, the burning house, and the imploded corpse in the bed. “No.”

“Lucky man. Think hard before ever changing that status.” He shook his head. “I have two brothers and a sister. George and Tom and Fanny. We’re orphans, and we’ve always been very close to each other. Had to be, you know?” He held his hand up and stared at it. “The—thought—of anything like this happening to them, of their becoming a part of this … especially Fanny, she’s only thirteen and I’ve always been her favorite …”

Crawford had to keep reminding himself that Julia really had died inexplicably and that he really had seen that levitating serpent this morning; what Keats was telling him might not be the true explanation, but there would never be a natural explanation for it.

The drinks arrived, and Crawford remembered to pay for them. He took a sip of the beer, then opened his mouth to speak.

Keats spoke first. “You want me to fetch your things from the house and bring them to you somewhere and be careful not to be followed.”

Disconcerted, Crawford shut his mouth and then opened it again. “Uh, right, as a matter of fact. I’d be very damned grateful … and though I can’t reward you now, as soon as I get settled abroad, I’ll—”

“Forget it. I may need a favor myself someday from a reluctant neff-host.” He raised his eyebrows. “Switzerland?”

Crawford could feel his face getting red as he stared at the younger man, for he knew that he hadn’t told anyone about his travel plans, and he himself didn’t know why he had decided to go to the Swiss Alps—Keats seemed to know more about Crawford than Crawford himself did.

“Look,” he said levelly, “I’m willing to admit that I’ve stumbled into something … supernatural here, and you obviously know more about the whole sordid business than I do. But I’d appreciate it if you’d just tell me what you know about my situation straight away, and save your sense of dramatic timing for your goddamn poetry.”

Keats’s confident smile was gone, and he suddenly looked young and embarrassed. “… Stephens?” he said. “Told you?”

“He did indeed. And how can you go on about how contemptible all these people are, these neffers, when you’ve saved those disgusting bladder stones to help you write your stuff? Do they work like good luck pieces? I suppose someday you’ll have old Barker’s deformed jawbone on your mantle—and then Byron and Wordsworth and Ashbless had better just fold up their tents and go home, right?”

Keats grinned, but his complexion was looking spotty. “Not your fault,” he said tightly, almost to himself. “You don’t know enough about it all for me to take offense … much offense, anyway.” He sighed and ran his fingers through his reddish hair. “Listen to me. I am one of the people who’ve attracted the attention of a member of this other race; as I said, it happened on the night I was born. If I wanted to use that connection to help my writing—and I think I could, these things may very well be the creatures remembered in myth as the Muses—I could summon my … my what, my fairy godmother, call it. I certainly wouldn’t have to hang around the neffy wards looking to snatch a bladder stone or a cup of blood, in the hope of getting the kind of dim contact that only really shows up in the warping of certain dreams.”

Crawford started to speak, but Keats waved him to silence and went on.

“Did you know—but no, you wouldn’t—that it’s fashionable among neffers to carry a blood-spotted handkerchief, so as to seem consumptive? It implies that you really got the attention of one of the vampires, that one of them can spare the time to devour you. Quite an honor … but I’m a member of the goddamned family. So are you, clearly. They pay so much attention to us that they won’t let us die—though they’ve got no such scruples about members of our real, earthly families.” Keats shook his head. “But my poetry is my own, damn you. I—I can’t help a lot of my situation—the protection, the extended life—but I will not let them have anything to do with my writing.”

Crawford spread the fingers of his maimed hand. “Sorry. So why do you save those things?”

Keats was staring out the window at the river. “I don’t know, Mike. I suppose it’s for the same reason I didn’t quit when the hospital administrators decided I was ignorant and unobservant enough to be assigned to Lucas. The more I know about these creatures, these vampires, the more likely it is that I’ll be able to get free of the one that oversaw my birth … and killed my mother.”

Crawford nodded, but he thought that Keats was lying, and mostly to himself. “The hospital administrators know about this stuff?”

“Sure … though it’s hard to say to what extent. A lot of patients vary from the human norm, of course, especially once you get a look inside them, but there’s a consistency to the neffy variations. And they’re generally less dramatic, too—the kidney and bladder stones just look a little quartzy, or the skin turns hard and brittle when they stay out too long in the sun, or they see fine at night but are blinded by daylight. I guess the hospital has decided to try to ignore it—not turn patients away for no reason, which would cause talk, but give the neffy cases to the most inept staff members. I wonder if something like today’s adventure has ever happened before—the senior surgeon sure closed the book on it in a hurry.”

“So why am I going to Switzerland?”

Keats smiled—a little sadly. “The Alps are the biggest part of the neffer dream.” He stared out at the river as if for help in explaining. “There’s supposed to be a plant in South America that gives people hallucinations if they drink a tea brewed from its leaves—like opium, but in this case everybody sees the same vision. A vast stony city, I understand. Even if a person hasn’t been told what to expect, he’ll still see the city, same as every other person who’s taken the drug.”

He paused to finish his wine, and Crawford waved for a refill. “Thanks. Anyway, being a neffer is similar. You dream about the Alps. A couple of months ago they brought a child from one of the worst Surreyside rookeries to the hospital because he was dying of consumption, and he didn’t last long here; but before he died, he found a piece of charcoal and drew a beautiful picture of a mountain on the wall by his bed. One of the doctors saw it and wanted to know what book the boy had copied the perfectly detailed picture of Mont Blanc from. Everybody just said they didn’t know—it would have been too much trouble to explain to him that the boy had done it out of his head, and that he had never seen a book nor ever been east of the Tower, and that his mother said he’d never drawn anything in his life, not even in mud with a stick.”

“Well, maybe I won’t go there. Maybe I’ll—I don’t know—” He looked up and saw Keats’s smile. “Very well, damn it, I have to go there. Maybe the way out of this whole entanglement is there.”

“Sure. Like the exit from the very bottom of Dante’s hell—and that just led to Purgatory.” Keats got to his feet and put his hand for a moment on Crawford’s shoulder. “You may as well wait for me here. I’ll make sure I’m not followed, and I’ll tell you if I see any official-looking types hanging about. If I haven’t come back in an hour, you’d better assume I’ve been arrested, and just go with what you’ve got on your back and in your pockets.”

CHAPTER 5

Desire with loathing strangely mixed

On wild or hateful objects fixed.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Pains of Sleep

After Keats had left, Crawford estimated the amount of money in the inner pocket of his coat—he hadn’t spent much of Appleton’s fifty pounds, and he figured he still had a fairly good stake—probably eighty pounds, certainly seventy. A little reassured, he waved to the girl and pointed at his empty glass.

He would travel and live cheaply now, and make his money last. In London a person could live, albeit without many new clothes or much meat in the diet, on fifty pounds a year, and things were sure to be less expensive on the continent. And with even a year’s leeway he certainly ought to be able to find himself a niche somewhere in the world.

All he had to do was get across the English Channel, and he was drunkenly confident that he’d be able to do that; hadn’t he been a shipboard surgeon for nearly three years? He assured himself that he still knew his way around a dock, and that even without a passport he would be able to get aboard a ship somehow.

The new beer arrived, and he sipped it thoughtfully. I suppose Julia’s been buried by now, he thought. I think I know now why I wanted to marry her—because a doctor, especially an obstetrician, ought to be married, and because I wanted to prove to myself that I could have children, and because all my friends told me what a stunning catch she was … and partially, I admit, because I wanted to obscure my memories of my first wife—but why did she want to marry me? Because I am, or was, a successful London doctor who seemed sure to come into real wealth before too long? Because she loved me? I guess I’ll never know.

Who were you, Julia? he thought. It reminded him of what she had said about her sister: “She’s got to become Josephine—whoever that may turn out to be.”

It seemed to him that what he would remember about England would be its graves: the grave of his older brother, who from out in the Moray Firth surf had shouted to young Michael for help, twenty years ago—shouted uselessly, for the sea had been a savage, elemental monster that day, crashing on the rocks like gray wolves tearing at a body, and Michael had sat on the high ground and watched through his tears until his brother’s arm had stopped waving and he could no longer identify the lump in the fragmented waves that was his body; and Caroline’s meager memorial, which was just the initials and dates that, one drunken night, he had furtively carved into the wall of the pub that had been built on the site of the house that had burned down with her in it; and now Julia’s grave, which he would never see. And each one was a monument to his failure to be what a man was supposed to be.

And how much, he wondered, of me will I be leaving here, buried in the foam at the bottom of this glass when I leave this inn and walk to London Dock? A lot, I hope. All the Michael Crawfords I tried to be: the ship’s surgeon, because Caroline had preferred a sailor to me; the man-midwife, because there seemed to be value in the innocence of infants. He held his glass up and winked at the warped in vitro reflection of his own face in the side of it. From now on it’s just you and me, he thought at the image. We’re free.

Suddenly Keats was at the window, looking tense. Alarmed, Crawford stood up and unlatched the window and pulled it open.

Instantly Keats pushed his portmanteau in over the sill. “She’s right behind me. Dump this out and give it back to me—she’ll be suspicious if she sees me without it now.”

“Christ.” Crawford took the bag and hastily carried it over to a table that had a tablecloth on it, unbuckled the straps and upended the bag; trousers and shirts tumbled out onto the table, and several rolled pairs of stockings fell off and wobbled across the floor. The barmaid called to him sharply, but he ignored her and ran back to the window. “Here,” he said, shoving the portmanteau back out into Keats’s hands. “Thanks.”

Keats nodded impatiently and made a get down gesture.

Crawford nodded and stepped away from the window, but peered out from around the edge with one eye. The barmaid was saying something behind him, and he dug into his pocket and threw a one-pound note over his shoulder. “I want to buy that tablecloth,” he rasped without looking around.

Keats was walking away from him, out onto the pier, swinging the leather portmanteau ostentatiously. Don’t overplay it, Crawford thought.

A moment later another person walked in front of the window, following Keats, and Crawford instinctively cringed back, for it was indeed Josephine, moving with all the indomitable purpose of one of the gear-driven figurines that emerge from German clock-towers to ring the bells. Crawford hoped for

Keats’s sake that she hadn’t managed to get her pistol reloaded.

Still peering out the window, Crawford backed across the hardwood floor to the table that had all his clothes on it; he flipped up the ends of the tablecloth and balled them up in his good fist.

At the end of the pier Keats glanced back and saw Josephine advancing at him; he swung the portmanteau around like a discus thrower and then let it sail off the end of the pier; Crawford’s whispered curse coincided with the distant splash.

“A pound’s enough for the goddamn tablecloth, I trust,” he said bitterly, thinking of how much he’d paid for the portmanteau.

“Yes sir,” said the barmaid, who edged away from him as he strode across to the street door, swinging his impromptu luggage with a sort of furious nonchalance.

He crossed London Bridge and, after walking east through the Billingsgate fish market, he sauntered as carelessly as he could past the Customs House and the Tower of London, envying the surrounding fish-sellers and housemaids and laborers their indifference to these imposing stone edifices that seemed to personify law and punishment. He kept glancing behind him, but he didn’t see any following figure that walked as though it had been wound up with a key.

He could tell by the shops he passed that he was approaching the docks. All the grocers had posted signs assuring the public that the barrels of beef and pork and biscuit they sold would keep forever in any climate, and every other shop window seemed to be crowded with brass sextants and telescopes and compasses—and the stiff paper compass-cards printed with the crystallized-looking rose indicating the directions. These shook with the rattling passage of every carriage as if fluttering in some otherwise-undetectable magnetic wind.

His tablecloth bundle was attracting the rude attention of a crowd of street boys, so he stepped into a shop that displayed luggage in the window—but the proprietor, after greeting him civilly enough at first, took a second look at Crawford’s face and then asked him how he dared to bring “filthy bones and teeth and marbles” into a store run by a Christian; the man actually drew a pistol from under the counter when Crawford tried to explain that his bundle just contained clothes and that he wanted luggage, so he fled back out to the street and the clamoring children.

One of the boys ran up behind him with a knife, slashed the bottom of his bundle and then yanked on the bulge of garment exposed; the sleeve of his green velvet jacket wound up hanging out, with a pair of undershorts from his more heavy-set days somehow caught in the lacy cuff.

Crawford whirled around so fast that the sleeve-and-shorts stood out behind him like a tail, but he wasn’t quick enough to see which boy had done it—though he did see the luggage shop proprietor standing in the shop doorway looking after him, and Crawford thought he saw the man make a hand-signal to someone across the street.

Just what I wanted, Crawford thought hysterically—an inconspicuous exit.

A pub door banged open farther down the street and two skinny, sick-looking men came hobbling out toward him, each of them waving a bloody handkerchief; they were both jabbering at once, but Crawford caught the word “stone” and another word that seemed to be “neffy-limb.”

He turned around to run back the way he’d come, but he thought he glimpsed stiff limbs swinging in the crowd, and a rigid, expressionless face … and so he swung his bundle around in a fast circle, much as Keats had done with his portmanteau, and let go of it. The tablecloth blew open and clothing billowed out in all directions and shoes flew into the crowd, and Crawford ran down an alley.

Enough people ran squabbling into the street after the explosion of valuable clothing to cause a raging traffic jam, but several members of the crowd came pelting along the alley after Crawford; he rounded a corner into a narrow old brick court and then, before his pursuers could appear behind him, he found a door, yanked it open and stepped inside, and then drew it closed behind him. There was a bolt on the inside, and he slid it across the gap into its bracket.

He was at the back of a crowd of men, evidently some class of laborers, in a low-ceilinged room that smelled of beer and sweat and candle wax, and though he wasn’t very successful in his efforts to breathe slowly, the men near him just glanced his way, nodded civilly and returned their attention to whatever was going on in front.

“Pile of old sail pieces here by the door,” came an authoritative voice from the far end of the room.

Crawford heard steps on the cobbles outside, and someone rattled the door at his back; but none of his companions made a move to let the person in, and a moment later the footsteps clumped away.

“Pick ‘em up as you go out,” the voice at the front of the room added, and the whole crowd began shuffling forward across the floor of what Crawford now recognized as a pub. Old sail pieces? he thought. What are we expected to do, wash windows?

No one gave him a second look as he filed out the pub door into the sunlight again, following the example of his companions and picking up several sheets of coarse cloth from a pile by the doorway. Once out in the yard the men around him began tying the rags around their shoes and ankles, and Crawford imitated them as best he could.

“More like this ‘ere, mate,” said one old fellow, tightening Crawford’s wrappings and pulling the overlap wider. “Loose like that and you’re sure to get gravel in there, and then it’s harder to get it out of your shoes than if you wasn’t wrapped at all.”

“Aha!” said Crawford. “Many thanks.” His gratitude was doubly sincere, for now he knew what sort of employment he had inadvertently volunteered for; these men were ballast-heavers, whose job it was to shovel gravel into the holds of ships that had discharged their cargoes and now needed extra weight in the holds to keep them from heeling too far to the wind. He had seen such work done often enough, he thought, to be able to do it himself. And it ought to get him aboard a ship.

The docks were vast, a series of interconnected canals and basins and pools; masts and spars and the diagonal slashes or droops of rigging fenced out the misty sky except for directly overhead, and the slow progress of a ship in the middle distance being towed in or out could be read by the way its profile blended and separated in the stationary pattern. Sitting in the stern of the ballast-heaver boat, Crawford eyed the hulls they poled and rowed their way between—towering away above if the ship had been unloaded and was riding high in the water or, if it was still laden with cargo, low enough so that he could have jumped and touched the railings—and he wondered which one might be his transport out of England.

The load of gravel in the boat smelled of the weedy river bottom it had lately been dredged from, but whenever there was a cold gust of breeze he could catch on it the smells of foreign lands—a heartening mix of tobacco and coffee aromas from one direction, a curry of conflicting spices from another, and the decayed smell of hides from a third; and the songs of the sailors on various ships made a cacophonous, multilingual opera to fill in the moments when the released chains of the cranes weren’t springing noisily upward and the coopers weren’t hammering barrels. He was glad conversation in the boat was practically impossible.

When the boat was finally turned toward the bow of the ship they were to ballast, another boat was already working on the portside. Crawford hiked himself up on his thwart and looked to refresh his memory of how the job was done.

A platform had been set up on poles that fitted into the boat’s gunwales, and men were shovelling gravel from the boat’s waist up onto the platform, where other men scooped it up and poked spadeful after spadeful into a yard-wide porthole in the side of the ship. Soon the view was cut off, as Crawford’s boat rounded the bow to load the starboard side, but he had seen enough to dampen his hope of getting aboard a ship this way. The Navy ships he’d sailed on had used stone blocks for ballast, and the heavers had had to be aboard the ships to stow it, but these men never even touched the ship except with the blades of their shovels.

Damn, he thought, it looks as if all I’ve done is committed myself to a day’s hard work—and without pay, since I’m not on the work list. Should I just dive overboard and swim away? I’ve got no luggage to worry about anymore.

The men on his own boat had already stood up and erected the scaffolding. “Up on the stage with ye,” growled an old fellow near him, pushing him forward, and a moment later Crawford found himself trying to climb up onto the platform while gripping the shovel someone had thrust into his hand. By the time he had clambered up onto the platform and was able to get to his feet, another man was already standing there and digging his shovel into the gravel that the men below were flinging up onto the sagging beams.

Crawford got to his feet and scooped up a couple of pounds of the stuff and swung the load toward the ship, but he nearly overbalanced and had to lean back quickly, and his shovelful of gravel slid off the blade and down into the dirty water between the boat and the ship’s hull. He felt he had done well to hang on to the shovel.

“Drunk, are you?” asked the man beside him. “Work below if you haven’t got sea legs.”

Stung that a landsman should say this to him, Crawford shook his head and dug the blade in again; he hefted a load of the gravel and then watched the way the man flung the stuff in through the porthole. A moment later it was his turn again, and he did it just the way the other man had, using the shovel blade against the rim of the porthole to catch himself before dumping the gravel inside, and then bracing it there again to push himself back upright afterward.

“That’s better,” the man allowed, and Crawford was embarrassed to realize that he was blushing at the praise.

After an hour his arms were aching with the effort, but it was only when his finger stump began to bleed that he thought he would have to stop. He was about to feign some kind of illness when a banging started up nearby and the men below stopped tossing the gravel up onto the stage.

The other ballast-heaver boat appeared from around the ship’s bow, and he could see that the noise was being made by two of the men in it clanging their shovels together overhead like actors portraying a fight with broadswords; and when he saw the men below him drop their own shovels and begin pulling baskets from under the gunwales he understood that this was the ballast-heavers’

customary supper ritual. He put down his shovel and let his arms hang limp at his sides, ignoring the blood that pattered regularly onto the wet boards of the stage.

His companion had jumped down into the boat and was scrambling to get at the baskets, but for a moment Crawford just watched, catching his breath and wondering if each workman had brought his own food or if this was some kind of common supper, provided by the contractor, that he might hope to get a bite or two of.

Just when he had decided to climb down and try for a bit of food, there was a yell of alarm from another ship, and when he looked up he saw a broad wooden pallet falling from a crane; it was tipping as it fell, and among the several tumbling crates that had been on it Crawford could see a man, his arms and legs waving uselessly as he dropped down through the misty air. From this vantage point it was difficult to guess whether he would hit the deck of the ship he had been helping to unload or splash safely into the water.

And, without thinking, Crawford turned and leaped across the gulf between the boat and the ship and caught the edge of the porthole; one kick and a convulsive jackknifing slither got him through it, and then he crossed his arms over his face an instant before he plowed headfirst into the heaped wet gravel and did an avalanching somersault down to the pebbled deck.

He sat up, cradling his bad hand and whimpering softly. The hold was dark, the only illumination being the beams of gray light slanting in through the dusty air from the portholes, but he could see that the deck was crisscrossed with knee-high partitions to divide it into low, square bins. He got up and walked to the farthest, darkest corner of the deck, being careful to step over the partitions and not kick them, and in the last bin he lay down, confident that he couldn’t be seen.

He hoped that the dock worker had hit the water.

For what seemed like an hour he waited, wondering if the ballast men would deduce where he had disappeared to, but eventually another shovelful of gravel came cascading in, and then another, and he knew that he was safe for now.

After a while he heard men come into the hold and begin shifting the piles, shovelling the gravel from one bin into another and arguing about whether one side had more weight fore or aft than it should, but they finished up and left without getting to the one he was hiding in. After that there was nothing to hear but the occasional faint thud of booted feet on some upper deck, and distant cries from out in the dock, and nothing to watch except the ponderously slow dimming of the light from the portholes.

He slept, and didn’t wake up until the ship was rocking in ocean swells, and moonlight rimmed the porthole edges and raised faint points of glitter on the higher gravel piles. The hold was chilly, and he wished he hadn’t lost the rest of his clothes. Despite the sea air, his head was filled with the smell of river-bottom rock.

Then he heard gravel shift, once, somewhere out across the deck, and he realized suddenly that it was the same noise that had awakened him.

A rat, he told himself nervously. Fattened on whatever cargo this ship carried to London, and now left with nothing to nibble on except gravel and my face. Better not sleep anymore. Too cold anyway—and getting colder by the moment.

The rattle came again, prolonged this time as though someone were letting the gravel run out from between cupped hands; then there was a noise like something heavy being dragged along. In the darkness the hold seemed vast, and the noise sounded far away, but he got an impression of terrible weight moving out there.

Crawford was suddenly much colder. Whatever that is, he thought, it isn’t a rat.

Dimly he could see that something had stood up in some farther region of the deck, something tall and broad. It wasn’t human.

Crawford stopped breathing, and even closed his eyes in case the thing could sense his gaze, and though he knew that even the most labored heartbeat can’t be heard at any distance, he was afraid that the shaking his own heart was giving him would knock him audibly against the partition of the bin.

But a moment later he was horrified to realize that a perverse impulse to make some noise was building in him; he managed, with some difficulty, to suppress it.

The thing was moving—walking, to judge by the regular, ponderous jars Crawford felt through the deck—and he opened his eyes in fear or even eagerness in case it might be coming toward him; but it was crossing to one of the portholes, and as it got closer to the moonlit circle he could see it more and more clearly.

Its torso seemed to be a huge bag at one moment and a boulder in the next, and the surface of it was all bumpy like chain mail; and when it had plodded its way on elephantine legs to the porthole, he could see that its head was just an angular lump with shadows that implied cheekbones and eye sockets and a slab of jaw.

Oddly, it seemed female to him.

It didn’t have arms to rest on the porthole rim, but Crawford sensed something weary about it—he got the impression that it had had no particular purpose in getting up … that it was just looking thoughtfully out at the sea as any sleepless voyager might.

For many long moments neither of them moved; Crawford lay stiff with something like terror, trying not even to tremble in the intense cold, and the thing by the porthole just stared out, though it didn’t seem to have eyes. Then finally it stepped back, grinding gravel to powder under its inconceivable feet, and it turned and faced Crawford across hundreds of feet of deck.

He was in total darkness, but he knew intuitively that the figure saw him, saw him by his body heat rather than by any light, and recognized him, knew him. Crawford wondered desperately how long he would be able to continue to keep from screaming—and again he almost wanted to scream, wanted it to come toward him.

But the thing didn’t approach him. It turned away and shambled back out across the deck into the darkness from which it had emerged, and after a few minutes he heard a long, rattling whisper of sifting gravel, and he knew that the thing had relaxed its sketchily anthropoid form back into the tiny stones that had comprised it.

It took Crawford a long time to get back to sleep.

CHAPTER 6

Ye that see in darkness,

Say, what have ye found?

—Clark Ashton Smith, Nyctalops

Something bumped against the hull, and Crawford awakened instantly, thinking that the gravel creature was up and moving around again—but the whole ship was creaking and rocking, and he could hear voices and the clumping of boots from overhead, and he guessed that they were arriving at their destination. After a few minutes his guess was confirmed by the splash of the anchor hitting the water. It was still night, unless somebody had fastened covers over the portholes.

He stood up quietly and groped his way to the porthole he’d come in through, being careful not to blunder out across the deck, and even when he was still yards short of the porthole the incoming land-scented breeze let him know that there was no cover in place, and that dawn had not yet come.

He poked his head out, and by starlight he could see a long stretch of land across a wide expanse of calm water, and he knew the ship was in some harbor. The air was hardly chilly at all now, leading him to believe that the ship must have sailed south—so this was France, or just possibly if they had made very good speed and exhaustion had made him sleep much longer than he thought, Spain.

He took off his boots and tied them together with his belt so that he could carry them while swimming, then set them down and peered out to fore and aft, trying to decide when he’d best be able to jump into the water unobserved … but when gravel shifted somewhere on the deck behind him he just sprang through the porthole in a somersault, touching the rim with nothing but his fingertips.

He hit water feetfirst, and plunged far down into the shockingly cold depths.

And he woke up completely; the seawater cleared his head of the feverish confusion that had plagued him throughout the last week, and as he began frog-kicking back up toward the water’s invisible surface he was already making plans.

He would return to England somehow and vindicate himself—after all, he was a respected doctor, and no jury could judge him even physically capable of doing what had been done to Julia—and he would shake this weird obsession with Switzerland. Keats’s tales were self-evidently the fantasies of an imaginative would-be poet. Crawford didn’t understand how he could even have listened to such nonsense.

Then he broke the surface and gulped air, and the doubts fell in on him again. He began paddling toward the stern of the ship, for the sound of voices seemed to be louder up by the bow, and he had already dismissed his momentary hope of returning to England and vindicating himself. You’ve already crossed the channel, he told himself; the Alps—the majestic, towering, dream-known Alps—are ahead of you. You can’t possibly turn back now.

Hell, he thought, even if you could go back safely …

When he rounded the high, square stern he saw that the ship’s anchorage was a good distance out from shore. The sky had only begun to glow a deep predawn purple over some hills far away across the black water on his right, but he was able to see a shoreline ahead of him, and patches of trees that seemed to shine faintly on the rising land beyond.

He looked back up at the ship, and was blinded by the relatively glaring light that shone from the cabin windows; he glanced away for several seconds as he quietly treaded water, and then squinted back, avoiding looking directly at the lights. There was one man visible on deck, his face and hands strangely luminous against the dark sky, but he was looking at the mainland, not down at Crawford, who turned away and began paddling silently toward shore.

After ten minutes of swimming he stopped berating himself for having jumped without grabbing his boots, for he knew now that he’d never have been able to drag them along with him all this way … but he was sorry that he’d used his belt to tie them together.

It made him nervous to be swimming in deep water without anything to lean on if he should get tired—he was reminded of dreams in which he could fly, but was always hundreds of feet in the air when his arms began to cramp from the furious flapping necessary to keep him aloft. Could he still get back to the ship? He turned and looked back, but the ship was now as distant behind him as the shore was ahead. Fighting down panic, he resumed his course. He had never felt as alone and unprotected … and when his knees and feet eventually bumped against sand, and he realized that he had reached shallow water, he wanted to nuzzle the gritty stuff like a strayed sheep finally found by the sleepless shepherd.

The sky was gray in the east now, and the trees on the distant hills had lost their luminosity. When he stood up and began wading to shore he saw low buildings—houses and a church tower—a few hundred yards ahead, and he paused, wondering what to do now. The surf swirled around his bare ankles, feeling warmer than the air now.

His French was no better than utilitarian—assuming this was France, which he hoped, for he knew no Spanish—and this didn’t look like a gathering spot for cosmopolitans. France and England had been at war too recently for the general populace to be eager to help a lost Britisher. The only marketable skill he had was doctoring, and he couldn’t imagine a crowd of peasants being eager to let him set their broken bones … much less let him attend to their pregnant wives.

Would the shopkeepers accept British money? Wet British money? If not, how was he even to get beer and bread and dry clothes?

The bell in the church tower began ringing, rolling its harsh notes away across the echoless gray salt flats, and he wished he were Catholic so that he could ask for sanctuary; or a Mason or a Rosicrucian or something, able to turn to his secret brethren for help.

As he walked up the sand slope it occurred to him that he was a member of a secret brotherhood … though he didn’t know if they were at all concerned with helping one another.

Let’s see, he thought, do I know any passwords? Neffy? God knows what that might mean in French. Should I wave a bloody handkerchief? Stick a pebble in my cheek like a squirrel and wink at people?

Then he remembered what Keats had said about the unmistakable “look” a neffer had—he’d said that Crawford must newly have become one, or he’d be used to getting attention from strangers who could recognize that look.

So he just walked around the little town, shivering in the onshore breeze and smiling at the fishermen who trudged past him down the broad lanes toward the beached dories, and then at the people who began ambling up to open the shops. Many of them looked twice at the haggard, soaked figure, but none of their gazes seemed to hold the kind of interest he was looking for.

Eventually he found a warm chimney and leaned against it, and it was there that the very old man in the dun-colored cassock found him. Crawford noticed him when he was still a dozen yards up the street—and the old man was hunching along so slowly, seeming to put the whole weight of his frail body on his gnarled walking stick with each step, that Crawford had plenty of time to study him.

Strong-looking yellow teeth were exposed when the leathery cheeks pulled back in a grin, and from deep in wrinkle-bordered sockets glittered an alert and humorous gaze; but Crawford wanted to look away, for it was somehow clear to him that longevity had been more costly to this man than it was to most. The figure stopped in front of him.

Then the old man spoke, and Crawford swore softly to himself, for the language had the rhythmic precision of southern Europe and the Mediterranean, and none of the skating, back-of-the-nose elision of Picardy or Normandy.

For several seconds he tried to recall any Spanish phrases … and couldn’t. But perhaps the man also spoke French.

“Uh,” Crawford began, desperately mustering his words, “Parlez-vous français? Je parle français—un peu.”

The old man laughed and spoke again, and this time Crawford understood a few words; apparently the old man was insisting that he was speaking French.

“Oh, really? Well, bonjour, Monsieur. Listen, non j’ai une passeport, mais—”

The old man interrupted with a question that sounded like Essay kuh votary fahmay ay la?

Crawford blinked, then shook his head and shrugged. “Repetez, s’il vous plaît—et parlez lentement.” It was the French sentence he always used most—a plea to repeat and speak more slowly.

The old man complied, and Crawford realized that he was indeed speaking French, but was pronouncing all the usually unaccented final e’s. The question had been, Is your wife here?

“Non, non …” Good God, he thought, has he got me confused with someone else? Or did he see my wedding ring? No, that’s right, it went with the finger. ”Non, je suis seul, alone, you understand. Now envers mon passeport…”

The old man put a finger to his lips, then winked and began limping away, waving his stick in front of him between each step as if to hold Crawford’s attention.

But something else had already caught his attention—the old man, too, was missing his wedding-ring finger.

The old man led him out of the village east along the shore, skirting hills that were purple with a richness of heather Crawford hadn’t seen since leaving Scotland, finally to a tiny house made from the bow half of an overturned fishing boat. The sawn sides had been boarded across and fitted with a low door and a head-sized window, and a few yards away crude wooden steps led down among piled rocks to a tide pool that was overhung with tangles of nets and lines and scaffolds.

Crawford’s guide dragged open the little door for him, and Crawford sidled inside in something like a fencer’s crouch. Archaic-looking books and liquor bottles filled the dim triangular room, but there was a square indentation in the dirt floor, and Crawford sat down there.

The bow corner of the room was a little fireplace, and Crawford moved some pans aside so as not to have to sit on his feet … He paused before setting the pans down, for though they were of an ordinary silvery color, they were much lighter than any metal he’d ever handled.

The old man was grinning again when he followed Crawford in and perched on a stack of books, and in his outlandish French he remarked that Crawford was sitting where the old man’s wife had always sat; but before Crawford could apologize or ask if the wife was likely to appear soon and demand her seat, the old man was talking again.

He introduced himself as François des Loges, a poet, and assured Crawford that this was indeed France—a village called Carnac, on the south Brittany coast near Vannes. There was a government office in Auray, eight miles distant, and Crawford’s passport problem, whatever it was, could be rectified there.

Crawford was beginning to get used to the old man’s accent, and he could see why he had mistaken it for Spanish at first; not only did the man pronounce all the terminal e’s, he also gave words like “mille” an almost Spanish or Italian lilt, and he rolled his r’s. It was recognizably French, but seemed to be French as it had been spoken when the Romance languages were still more parallel than divergent.

Des Loges had pulled a straw plug out of a bottle as he was speaking, and now poured brandy into two blue crystal cups. Crawford sipped the liquor gratefully, and then, setting aside his doubts of the old man’s ability to give arbitrary and illegal orders to Customs officials, asked what he would be expected to do in return.

The brandy in des Loges’s cup caught a gleam of morning sunlight through the warped glass of the little window, and threw a spectrum of purple and gold across the weathered planks that were the wall. “Qui meurt, a ses loix de tout dire,” he began.

Crawford mentally translated this as A dying man is free to tell all. As des Loges went on, Crawford had to keep interrupting with requests that he talk more slowly, and even so he wasn’t sure he was understanding the old man’s speech.

Des Loges seemed to be saying that he had imprisoned his wife—though he waved toward the sea when he said it—and was now free, with help from the right sort of person, to get away forever. The in-laws might not be pleased—here, for some reason, he nodded toward the pans Crawford had moved—but they couldn’t touch him. He picked up one of the lightweight pans, made a face, and tossed it out the door onto the dirt outside. “Disrespectful, I know,” he added in his strange French, “but they’re not even good for cooking—they’re always getting pitted, and they discolor sauces and eggs terribly.”

He had had many women during his life, he told Crawford, but he wouldn’t tell anyone where these “yquelles” resided currently. None of them could get at him now, that was the important thing. He pointed at Crawford’s maimed hand and, with a grin, said he was sure Crawford understood.

Crawford was pretty sure he didn’t understand, though, especially when the old man concluded his speech by saying, “Les miches de Saint Estienne amons, et elles nous assuit,” which seemed to mean, “We love the loaves of St. Stephen, and they pursue us.”

But when des Loges stood up and asked Crawford if they were in agreement, Crawford nodded and assured him that they were. If he can get my passport stamped, he thought, then I will help him do whatever this procedure is that’ll protect him from his in-laws, or from loaves of bread, or whatever it is. And even if he can’t, even if he’s crazy, at least he’s a contact in a foreign land—and I’m ahead already by a roof and a glass of brandy.

The old man threw Crawford a pair of ancient shoes to put on, and from behind the door he lifted a cloth sack and indicated that Crawford could carry it—remarking, as they left the little house, that he had bought extra food and drink when he had heard that Crawford was coming.

Startled, Crawford asked him how he had heard that—but des Loges just winked, pointed at Crawford’s hand again and then pointed to the tide pool below them. Crawford stepped to the edge of the rocks and looked down, but the only thing he could see in the pool was a knee-high pyramidal stone with a square base.

Walking back away from the water, Crawford looked around for some sign of a paddock where horses or donkeys might be kept, but the little boat-house was the only structure on the heathery hillside. Was old des Loges planning to walk eight miles at his crippled-bug pace?

He was glad that the shoes were a good fit—and a moment later he wondered if des Loges had bought them when he had bought the food, having been told Crawford’s shoe size in advance too.

Then he saw that the old man had dragged out from behind the house a child’s wagon with a rope attached to its front, and that some kind of shoulder-harness was tied to the far end of the rope. As Crawford watched incredulously, des Loges climbed into the wagon, with his knees tucked up under his chin, and tossed the harness-end of the rope into the dust at Crawford’s feet.

The old man helpfully pantomimed putting the harness on. “In case I didn’t get the idea, eh?” said Crawford in English as he picked the thing up. He slowly put it on, feeling the stiffness in his joints and wishing he hadn’t spent the night curled up in a cold wooden bin. “Well, I’ll tell you this—you’d better be able to get me a passport.”

Very clearly, des Loges asked him if, for the walk, he would prefer stone-soled shoes.

Crawford declined the offer.

“Ah, le fils prodigue!” remarked des Loges in his barbarous French, shaking his head.

Crawford leaned forward against the rope and the wagon creaked forward, but then he realized that he was still carrying the bag. He stopped and walked back and, over protests, made des Loges hold it. Then, with that small victory won, he walked back until the rope was tight again and began pulling. Within the first few minutes he had figured out the most comfortable way to wear the harness, and the easiest-to-maintain pace.

As he plodded away from the sea, leaving the village behind as the ground slowly rose, the only smells were of sun-heated stone and the spice of heather, and the only violations of the sky’s quiet were Crawford’s heavy breathing and the creaking of the wheels and the monotonous skirling of the bees.

After what might have been an hour he crested a hill, and found himself facing a broad, shallow inland valley … and he stopped abruptly, letting the wagon roll forward and bump him in the calves, for an army of giants stood in ranks across the distant gray-green slopes.

Then he heard the old man laughing at him and he realized that the figures in the valley weren’t men but were upright stones—the landscape reminded him vaguely of Stonehenge.

A little embarrassed at having been startled by the sight, he began walking down the north slope of the hill; but after the wagon had twice more bumped him from behind, he decided that it would be easier to let the wagon roll down the hill ahead of him backward while he trudged along after it, hauling back on the rope and acting as a brake.

In this ludicrous posture they were passed by a party of six unamused monks on donkeys, and des Loges added to Crawford’s humiliation by choosing that time to recite, in a loud and sarcastic voice, a local legend that held the stones to be a pagan army that had been chasing one St. Cornely toward the sea until the saint turned, and, by the exertion of his virtue, petrified them all in place.

A narrow arm of the sea extended far inland, narrowing to a river eventually, and the buildings of the little town of Auray clustered around the mouth of the river and mounted in steep lanes and terraces up the flanks of the hills on either side.

From the old man Crawford had learned that the history of the whole area was peppered with miracles and apparitions—only a mile away to the east was the Chappelle Ste. Anne, where the Virgin had appeared to a peasant named Yves Nicolazic and told him to build a church there, and down the road a little way stood a cross marking a fourteenth-century battlefield, the unshriven casualties of which were condemned, according to popular belief, to wander the hills until the Last Day—but the citizens weren’t prepared for the procession that came plodding and creaking and barking into town at a ceremonious pace just at sunset on that Friday.

All day Crawford had alternately sweated in the sun and shivered in the sea breezes as he dragged the wagon along the rutted road, and at lunch he and his passenger had each drunk an entire bottle of claret with the bread and cheese and cabbage des Loges had packed; just before they resumed their journey the old man had bitten eye-holes into the cloth bag and pulled it over his head like the hood of a bucolic executioner, and Crawford had followed his example by donning as a hat the hollowed-out shell of the cabbage head.

Having finally reached Auray, these many hours later, the cabbage was wilted but still clinging to his head, and he was noctambulistically intoning the refrain to a song des Loges had begun singing hours ago; and the melody, or perhaps the wing-flapping motions with which the wagon-bound old man had chosen to accompany it, had attracted a following procession of barking dogs. Children ran into houses and several old women blessed themselves fearfully.

Des Loges broke off his singing long enough to tell Crawford where to turn and which one of the fifteenth-century buildings to stop in front of; and when the wagon rolled to a halt and he was finally able to take off the harness, Crawford blinked around at the steep streets and old houses and wondered what he was doing here, weary, fevered and cabbage-decked.

They’d stopped at a two-story stone building with half a dozen windows upstairs but only a single narrow one at street level. The eaves projected a good yard out beyond the wall, and the building was just perceptibly wider at the bottom than at the top, and Crawford thought the place had a forbiddingly oriental look. A thin, middle-aged man in an outmoded powdered wig was staring down at them in consternation from one of the upstairs windows.

“This had better be it, François,” the man called.

“I’ll see that the widow is delivered to you in a lace dress and a veil,” answered des Loges in his archaic French, “and that Mont St. Michel stands in for her father! But Brizeux!—until my cousin here resumes his travels I can’t spare the hospitality.”

The man in the window nodded tiredly. “Everybody needs help in passing on. One moment.” He disappeared, and a few moments later the street door was pulled open. “Come in, come in,” Brizeux said, “God knows you’ve drawn enough attention already.”

The sunset glow overwhelmed the lamplight inside, and it wasn’t until the door was closed again that the ranked shelves of ledgers and journals regained their air of significance.

Brizeux led them into a private office and waved toward a couple of velvet-upholstered chairs; dimly on the faded cloth backs Crawford could see the outline of the embroidered Napoleonic B that had been cut off recently and, more faintly, the shadow of the fleur-de-lis that had preceded it. Brizeux was as erratic in his politics as the chair, addressing his guests as “citoyens” one moment and as “monsieurs” the next. His French, at least, was pure Parisian.

Crawford looked at the man curiously. He was nearly a caricature of a law clerk, fussy and shabby and ink-stained and smelling of book-bindings and sealing wax, but he seemed to hold a position of authority here—and, to Crawford’s surprise, he seemed to be willing to give Crawford a passport.

He opened a drawer in his desk and dug out a double handful of passports and then shuffled through them, squinting up at Crawford from time to time as if to judge the fit. Finally, “Would you be more at ease as a veterinarian or as an upholsterer?” he asked.

Crawford smiled. “A veterinarian.”

“Very well. Henceforth you are Michael Aickman, forty-two years old, late of Ipswich, who arrived in France on the twelfth of May. Your family is doubtless worried about you.” He handed Crawford the passport.

“What happened to the original Michael Aickman?” he asked.

Brizeux shrugged. “Waylaid by criminals, I imagine. Perhaps he was carrying a lot of money … or perhaps his assailants simply killed him for his passport, which could be sold to,” he permitted himself a sour smile, “certain unscrupulous public officials.”

“And how much would a public official charge for one of these?”

“Quite a bit,” said Brizeux cheerfully, “but in your case des Loges here has elected to … pay your bill for you.”

Crawford glanced at des Loges and began to wonder what, exactly, the ancient man expected in return; but Brizeux had now initialed the passport and was flipping through the pages to show him what his new signature looked like, and

Crawford pushed the worry away.

“You’ll want to practice it until you can do it instinctively,” said Brizeux, grinning up at him as he handed the document across.

It occurred to Crawford that Brizeux resembled young Keats—not in much, for Keats was young and burly and Brizeux was gray and frail, but very strongly in the eyes. The eyes of both of them, he realized, had the same unhealthy brightness, as if they were infected with the same rare kind of fever.

When they were outside again des Loges began hobbling back toward the wagon.

“No! We’ll take a regular coach back,” said Crawford in slow, carefully pronounced French. “I’ll pay for it.” His feet had been throbbing painfully ever since he had stopped pulling the wagon, and he could feel them swelling in the borrowed shoes.

“No doubt you could satisfy the coachman, but what I’d need to be paid isn’t yours to offer,” laughed des Loges, not looking back or pausing.

“Wait, I mean it. I would think you’d prefer it yourself, that can’t be the most comfortable position to be in all day—or all night, in this case. Why don’t we just—”

The old man had stopped, and was looking back at him. “Didn’t you look at the wheels?” he demanded in his barbaric French. “Why do you think I asked you if you wanted stone shoes?”

Crawford walked bewilderedly to the wagon, crouched beside it and spat on one of the wheels and rubbed off the caked mud. The rim of the wheel was studded with flat stone ovals—no wonder the grotesque vehicle had begun to seem ponderous during the day! He looked up at the old man blankly.

“Your wife never told you?” asked des Loges in a quieter voice. “Travel over stone doesn’t age us, you and me. A family courtesy, you might say. I wore stone-soled shoes for more years than I can count, but age crept up anyway, when I’d change them or take a stroll barefoot for a treat, and now I just don’t have the strength for it anymore. I’ve got a stone base to my walking stick, though, and I make sure to lean on it. Every little bit, right?”

“Uh … right.”

“I’ll give you a pair of stone soles before you go. And wear them, you hear me? You’ll be good for centuries more, easily, just so you don’t insulate yourself from your wife.”

“But I’m not married, certainly not to one of these … things.” His fever suddenly seemed much worse, and his breath was as hot as a desert wind in his head. “Am I? Could my wife have been one of them?”

“Assuredly—a fellow-husband can tell it just to glance at you, even without the evidence of your finger.”

Crawford shook his head uncomprehendingly. “But she’s dead … so I can hardly keep from insulating myself from her.” “I really doubt that she’s dead.”

Crawford chuckled dizzily. “You should have been there. Crushed like a press-full of grapes for wine, she was, and on our wedding night.”

Des Loges’s walnut-wrinkled face softened in what might have been pity. “Boy, that wasn’t your wife.” He shook his head, then climbed into the wagon. “I got your passport—now pull me home so that you can do your part of the bargain.”

Crawford considered just walking away, hiring a carriage to take him at top speed to the Swiss border, and leaving this old man to walk, or hire some child to pull his wagon—but, almost in spite of himself, he remembered Appleton with the horse and money, and Keats with his luggage.

He bent over stiffly and picked up the harness.

Twilight had fallen before they were five miles south of Auray, but des Loges refused to consider spending the night in an inn, even when Crawford pointed out that there was no moon tonight to see by; and so Crawford plodded on, wondering feverishly if there would ever again be a time when he wasn’t dragging this wagon around the Brittany hills.

The moon was indeed in its dark phase, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he discovered that he could nevertheless see it as a faint ring in the sky. The ground seemed to have a dim glow too, and several times when he heard noises in the surrounding fields he glimpsed patches of phosphorescence moving behind the wild shrubbery; and when an owl sailed past he was able to follow its silent flight for several long seconds before it swooped toward some small animal.

As the miles unrolled away behind, Crawford settled into a comfortable, metronomic pace, and when a pebble worked its way into his shoe through a gap at the side of the sole, he was reluctant to break his stride and take the shoe off—but after a few seconds he realized that the pebble wasn’t at all uncomfortable. It might have been a fever-born delusion, but that foot, the whole leg, in fact, felt much less tired, springier; and so when he did pause it was to find another pebble and poke it into his other shoe. Behind him, des Loges laughed softly.

This time he wasn’t startled by the valley of the standing stones, even though at night the figures looked much more like motionless men lined up across the miles of nighted plain for some unimaginable purpose. Luminous mists played over the stones in the starlight, and Crawford, dizzy and sick, thought the mists greeted him; he nodded back and waved his maimed hand.

It was past midnight when he pulled the wagon up beside the inverted half-boat that was des Loges’s house. When they had got inside, the old man gave him a cup of brandy and showed him a corner he could sleep in.

At noon the next day Crawford was awakened by the old man calling to him from outside. He came stumbling out of the tiny house, blinking in the glaring sunlight, but it wasn’t until he walked out to the rocks and looked down into the tide pool, and saw old des Loges sitting in the water next to the angular rock, that he remembered escaping from the ship and acquiring a passport.

And now you’ve got to do him this favor, he thought as he squinted around and scratched under his unfresh shirt. I hope it’s something you can do quickly, so as to be on the road again before the sun moves too much farther west. Nothing like the sleep-late life of a fugitive! He shook the pebbles out of the battered shoes, pulled them on and then climbed down the sandstone boulders to where des Loges sat.

The old man was dressed in the same dun cassock he’d been wearing the day before, and the clear seawater was rocking and swirling around his upper chest. The roughly hewn pyramidic stone was submerged, but Crawford could see that a segmented necklace of silver and wooden beads and some kind of onionlike bulbs was draped around the base of it—the buoyant wood and vegetable sections arched upward and waved in the currents, but the silver sections held the strange jewellery down on the sand.

Crawford glanced around again, uneasily, for all at once he knew that something bad was supposed to happen here, and he didn’t know what direction it was likely to come from.

The old man was grinning up at him. “Married in the mountains, divorced by the sea!” he piped. “It’s high tide now, but after you’ve liberated me, do please break that garlic necklace, will you? I’m not selfish, and I do like to pay my debts.”

Though mystified, Crawford nodded. “Got you. Break the necklace.” He dipped a toe into the water and winced at the chill. “You’re … getting divorced?”

“That’s the ceremony I want you to perform,” des Loges told him. “It shouldn’t be any problem. I’m a frail old man, and anyway I promise not to struggle.”

“Do I have to get in the water?”

Des Loges rolled his eyes. “Of course you’ve got to get in the water! How are you going to drown me if you don’t get in the water?”

Crawford grinned. “Drown you. Indeed. Listen, I—” Glancing at the necklace-bordered stone, he realized that it had a square base—and there had been a square dent in the ground where des Loges had said his wife always sat. “How does this divorce work?” he asked unsteadily.

Des Loges was watching the tide anxiously. “You drown me. It’s just a token killing, really—suicide won’t work, you see. Accident or murder only, and with the wife,” he waved toward the stone, “incapacitated. And it has to be you—I knew it had to be you when I first heard you were on your way—because you’re married into the family. They won’t interfere with you; anybody else they could stop, or at least visit vengeance upon.”

Crawford was reeling, and had to kneel down. “That rock, there, in the water by you. Are you trying to—is that your—”

“Brizeux has no family, no children!” des Loges shouted. “There’s no one at stake but he and I, and we know what we’re doing. For God’s sake, the tide’s going out—hurry! You promised!”

As if to give Crawford a head start, the old man bent over and shoved his own face into the water; and with his four-fingered hand he beckoned furiously.

Crawford looked again at the sunken pyramid … and a voice in his head said, No. Getaway.

Crawford turned and ran, as fast as his stiff legs could propel him, east—toward Anjou, and Bourbonnais and, somewhere beyond, Switzerland.

CHAPTER 7

I said “she must be swift and white

And subtly warm and half perverse

And sweet like sharp soft fruit to bite,

And like a snake’s love lithe and fierce.”

Men have guessed worse.

—A. C. Swinburne, Felise

And always, night and day, he was in the mountains,

and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.

—Mark 5:5

Like the fingers of a vast, invisible harpist, high-altitude winds were drawing plumes of snow from the top of distant Mont Blanc and casting them out across the whole southwest quarter of the sky; and in spite of the sunlight that raised steam from the slate roofs of the riegelhausen around him and made him carry his coat instead of wear it, Crawford shivered with something like sympathy as he watched the faraway mountain, and for a moment he could vividly imagine how these Geneva streets would look from the viewpoint of a person with a telescope on the summit.

Blue sky glittered in the puddles of rainwater between the cobblestones underfoot, and in the west a rainbow spanned the whole valley between Geneva and the Monts du Jura. Looking down from the too bright sky, Crawford saw a young woman approaching him hesitantly from across the street.

Though her fair hair and lace-trimmed red bonnet implied that she was a native, her pallid beauty seemed suited to some less sunny land, and her sick smile was jarring among these gaily painted housefronts—it seemed to Crawford to be somehow fearfully eager, like the smile of an unworldly person loitering around a foreign waterfront in the hope of selling stolen property or hiring a murderer.

“L’arc-en-ciel,” she said hoarsely, nodding over her shoulder at the rainbow but not looking at it. “The token of God’s covenant to Noah, hmm? You look, pardon me, like a man who knows the way around it.”

Crawford assumed she was a prostitute—the Hôtel d’Angleterre was just ahead, after all, and no doubt many of the English tourists who could afford to stay there would appreciate a girl who didn’t require the services of an interpreter—and he was chagrined, but not very surprised, to realize that he was not tempted to take her upstairs somewhere. He had just spent a full month in traversing France, and never during that time, even when he was working alongside very healthy young girls in the vineyards, had he felt any stirring of erotic interest. Perhaps the death of his wife was still too recent … or perhaps his intensely sexual dreams, the near nightmares that plagued him and left him drained and fevered in the mornings, were leaving him no energy for the pursuit of real women.

But before he could reply to her ambiguous remark, there was a scuffling on the side of the street she’d come from.

“It’s that damned atheist, let him lie,” a gruff man’s voice called, and then a girl cried, “A doctor, someone go for a doctor!”

Crawford automatically pushed the young woman aside and loped past her across the street.

“I’m a doctor, let me through,” he said loudly, shoving his weathered but newly bought portmanteau between the people who were clustered in a rough semicircle against the wall of a tavern. They backed away to let him in, and at the focus of the crowd he found a frail-looking youth lying unconscious on the stones, his wispy blond hair clinging damply to his forehead.

“He started talking crazily, wildly,” said a girl who was crouched beside him, “and then he simply fell over.” Crawford realized that she was the one who had called for a doctor. She was English, and idly he noted that he would once have found her, too, attractive, though in contrast to the Swiss girl she was dark-haired and plump.

He got down on one knee and felt the young man’s pulse. It was rapid and weak. “It looks like sunstroke,” he snapped. “Got to get the temperature back down. Get me wet cloths—anything, a sail … curtains, a cloak—and something to fan him with.”

A couple of people ran away, presumably to get the wet cloths, and Crawford pulled off the unconscious man’s jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt. A moment later he had peeled it off too, and he tossed both garments over his shoulder. “Soak up some rainwater with these,” he yelled, “and give them back to me.”

Crawford stood up then and began flapping his own coat back and forth over the thin torso. It occurred to him that this young man resembled someone he’d met recently.

“Wasting your time, my good man,” said one foppishly dressed Englishman cheerfully. “That’s Shelley the atheist. Let him die and the world’s a better place.”

Crawford was about to say something about the Hippocratic Oath, but another man had just limped up from the direction of the hotel, and this new arrival swung around to give the tourist a frigid smile. “Shelley is a friend of mine,” he said tightly. “If you have friends, perhaps you would be so kind as to have one of them arrange a time when you and I can meet somewhere at your convenience and … reason with each other?”

“Good God,” muttered someone in the crowd, “it’s Byron.”

Crawford, still flapping his coat, glanced over at the newcomer. He did seem to resemble the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as the drawings in the London papers had portrayed him—with a moody but classically handsome face under a wind-tossed mane of dark curls. Crawford had vaguely heard that the man had left England, but he hadn’t known he had come to Switzerland. And who was this “atheist” Shelley?

The English tourist’s face was dark and he was looking away, back toward the hotel. “I … apologize,” he muttered, then turned and stalked off.

The blond young woman who’d talked to Crawford about the rainbow came hobbling over with a blanket and a bucket of water—and before she let Crawford dunk the blanket she shook into the water a handful of what seemed to be white sand. “Salt,” she said impatiently, as if Crawford should have thought of it himself. “It makes the water a better conductor of electricity.”

Byron seemed startled by the remark, and looked more closely at her.

“Great, thank you,” Crawford said, too busy to bother with her odd remark. He balled up the blanket and plunged it into the water, and then draped the sodden fabric over Shelley’s thin frame—noting, as he tucked it around him, a wide, corrugated scar on the young man’s side, below the prominent ribs. One of the ribs, in fact, seemed to be missing.

The English girl who had called for a doctor smiled up at Crawford. “You must have been a ship’s surgeon,” she said, “to have instinctively called for a sail.”

Both Byron and Crawford looked at her uncomfortably.

“Oh, hello, Claire,” said Byron. “I didn’t see you there.”

“Yes,” Crawford put in shortly. “I was in the Navy in my youth.”

Just then another man came bustling up. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “I’m a physician, let me pass.”

“The situation’s well in hand, Pollydolly,” said Byron. “It seems Shelley has had a sunstroke.”

“According to whose diagnosis?” The man with the implausible name glared around at the crowd and then focussed on Crawford. Crawford noticed that he was young—in his twenties, probably, and trying to hide the fact behind his ostentatious moustache and blustery manner. “Yours, sir?”

“Yes,” said Crawford, “I’m a surgeon—”

“A barber, that is to say.” The newcomer smirked. “Well! While I won’t deny that Shelley could benefit from the services of—of one of your trade, I can’t applaud your—your methods of—”

“Oh, save it, Polly,” interrupted Byron. “This man seems to be doing fine—look, Shelley’s coming around now.”

The young man on the pavement had half sat up, and was hugging Claire; he hadn’t yet opened his eyes. “Her conscious tail her joy declared,” he said in a thin, high voice, obviously reciting something; “the fair round face, the snowy beard, the velvet of her paws, her coat that with the tortoise vies …”

Obviously embarrassed for his friend, Byron laughed. “That’s from Thomas Gray’s poem about the favorite cat that drowned in a tub of goldfish. Here, let’s see if we can’t get him up—”

“Mommee!” Shelley yelled suddenly. “It wasn’t Daddy, it was the tortoise-thing from the pond! You must have known, even if it did make itself look like him! It lives in the pond, in Warnham Pond….” His eyes flew open then, and he blinked around without evident recognition at the faces over him. Crawford and the thin, sick-looking young woman were standing next to each other, and Shelley’s gaze stayed on them for a moment, then darted away.

Warnham, Crawford was thinking. That’s where I lost my wedding ring.

Byron grabbed Shelley under the arm and hauled him to his feet. “Can you walk, Shelley? Here’s your coat, though some helpful soul has mopped the street with it. Sir,” he added, turning to Crawford, “we’re in your debt. I’m staying at the Villa Diodati, just north along this shore of the lake, and the Shelleys are my neighbors—do visit us, especially if … if we can be of any aid to a fellow traveller.”

Byron and Claire each took one of Shelley’s arms and led him away, and the physician with the ludicrous name followed, after shooting Crawford a baleful squint. Crawford again noticed that Byron was limping, and now he remembered reading that the young lord was lame—clubfooted.

The crowd was dispersing, and Crawford found himself walking beside the thin girl who had asked him if he knew a way around rainbows. “Sometimes they appear to be reptiles,” she remarked, as casually as if she were resuming a conversation.

Crawford was worrying about having admitted to being a surgeon and onetime Navy man. “I daresay,” he answered absently.

“I mean, I’m certain it wasn’t really a tortoise.”

“I suppose that is unlikely,” he agreed.

“My name is Lisa,” she said.

“Michael.”

She rocked her head dreamily, and Crawford noticed her high cheekbones and large, dark eyes, and he was again sourly aware of how attractive he would once have found her.

“Have you ever seen one that regal?” she asked him softly. “His mother was damned fortunate. The closest to real love I ever had was the hand of a statue…. I lived with it for years, but then I became anemic, and people noticed that I couldn’t be out in the sun anymore, and so the priests came with the salted holy water and killed it. I suppose I’m grateful—I’d certainly be dead today if they hadn’t—but I still look for rocks on the slopes of the mountains.”

“The hand of a statue,” echoed Crawford, thinking again about Warnham.

“I was luckier than most,” she said, nodding as if in agreement. She glanced at him shyly and licked her lips. “Have you brought with you any …” She blushed, then went on in a lower voice, “… any loaves of St. Stephen? We could, you and I could, be together through them—” She took his hand and drew it across her cheek, then kissed the palm; the gesture seemed forced, but for a moment he had felt the hot, wet tip of her tongue. “—we could share in their interest in us, Michael, and at least be interested in each other that way….”

Crawford realized that this was what Keats had told him about, and had something to do with what des Loges had wanted him to do; and he admitted to himself that he recognized the same ill glitter in Lisa’s eyes that he had seen in the eyes of Keats and that government clerk, Brizeux—he would have to study his own face in a mirror sometime.

“I’m sorry,” he told her gently. “I don’t have anything.”

“Oh.” She dropped his hand, though she kept walking beside him. “You have had recently, though—you shine with it like ignis fatui, will-o'-the-wisps, over a stagnant pond.”

He glanced sharply at her, but she was looking listlessly ahead and seemed to have meant no offense.

“Maybe you could come to the mountains with me sometime and look for rocks,” she said, beginning to draw away from him. “I know a couple of high places where landslides have exposed the metal, that silvery metal that’s as light as wood, and we could check all the rocks nearby, for live pieces.”

He nodded and waved as she receded into the crowd. “Sounds like fun,” he said helplessly.

Visits to a few of the nearby hotels and inns convinced him that he couldn’t afford to lodge within Geneva’s walls, so he took a coach through the villages northward along Lake Leman’s east shore; and in one of them he found a room for rent in a sixteenth-century log house, the windows of which looked down over narrow lanes to a beach grooved by the keels of the fishing boats that had been dragged from there down to the lake that morning.

He slept until dark, and then spent most of the night staring out across the lake at the remote, sky-banishing blackness that was the Jura; sometimes he turned to face the northeast corner of his room and, beyond the panelling, beyond the house and the hills of the Chablais and the Rhône River, he could sense the separate majesties of the Bernese Alps far away in the night—Mönch, the Eiger, and the Jungfrau.

Some time after midnight the sky began slowly to ripple and gleam in vast curtains like the Aurora Borealis, and the stars went out; the massed trees around the lake began to shine faintly, and for just a few moments, like someone who hears a distant music when the wind is right, he thought he could feel through his heels the reverberations of a long-ongoing litany from the very heart of the stony earth. He slept, and dreamed of the cold woman again.

She was in the room with him in this dream, and that was a first—when he had dreamed of her in England and France he had always seemed to meet her on an island where ruins shouldered up between ancient olive trees, and the two of them had made love on a floor of marble tiles that was streaked by alternate bands of moonlight and the shadows of broken pillars. Always her skin was cold, and after she had drained him she slithered away so rapidly into the viny shrubbery that he knew her shape could no longer be human … and it had maddened him, every time, to be unable to follow her, for in the dream he was somehow convinced that her reptilian shape would prove to be as erotically beautiful as her human one.

Tonight she seemed to come in as a mist between the casements, but she was in her human form by the time he looked fully at her. She was naked, as always before, and he was so dazzled by the sight of her that he hardly noticed her arm snake out and turn his shaving mirror to face the wall. Then her white fingers reached out and unbuttoned his shirt, and his lungs seemed to clog full with ice when her cold nipples pressed against his chest.

He fell backward onto the bed and she followed and straddled him, and he realized, with no feeling except gratitude, that it was she he had made love to in the hours before the dawn when he found Julia’s body. Now she bent down to give him a passionate kiss—her hair fell in coils around his ears, and he abandoned himself to her.

Her flesh warmed around him as the hours were achingly chiselled away, and when at last she rose from the bed she was actually glowing faintly, like the bricks lining a smithy’s stove. She leaned down and took his limp hand as if to kiss it, but when she lifted it to her lips it was only to bite the stump of his missing finger. The blood spurted rackingly into her mouth, and the strained bed joints squealed as he convulsed into unconsciousness.

He cringed when the morning sunlight touched his face, and though the effort made his legs shake and sent him gasping and sweating back to bed, he managed to drag the curtain across the torturing bright gap. The bedsheet was blotted brown with blood from his freshly torn finger stump.

Only after sunset was he able to venture outside, and at twilight he found himself on a ledgelike walkway notched across the lake-facing side of an ancient stone house, and after leaning on the iron railing for half an hour, watching silent lightning play over the mountains beyond the far shore, he noticed a boat out on the face of the water.

It was a small sailboat, its mainsail blue under the salmon sky, skating toward him on the breeze that twitched at his coat collar and made the water’s sky-reflecting skin flutter like a sheet of gold-leaf held up to a whisper. There was one solitary figure aboard.

A set of stone steps slanted down to the water at Crawford’s left, and when it became clear that the boat was headed directly toward him he found himself slowly walking to the steps and then descending them. By the time the boatman was close enough to swing broadside to the wind and loose the sail, Crawford was waiting for him on the stone dock at the water’s edge, and he caught the painter-rope the boatman tossed to him.

Crawford tugged the boat in to the dock, and as he crouched to loop the rope around a weathered wooden post, Percy Shelley stepped agilely from the rocking boat onto the unmoving stone.

The line secured, Crawford straightened up. It was the first time he’d seen Shelley’s face under normal conditions, and he flinched.

“The resemblance is not coincidental,” Shelley said with a kind of grim amusement. “She’s my half sister.”

Crawford didn’t have to ask who he meant … and he remembered some of the things Shelley had said during his heat-stroke delirium. “Half sister? Who—who was her father?”

Shelley’s face was haggard but merry. “Can I trust you?”

“I—don’t know. Yes.”

Shelley leaned against the wooden post. “I’m pretty sure I can trust you in exactly the same way I can trust a flower to turn toward the sun.” He made a slight bow. “That will suffice.”

Crawford frowned at that, and wondered why he should believe anything that Shelley might tell him. Well, he thought, he is her brother—visibly he’s her brother.

“You asked about her father,” Shelley was saying. “Well, to start with, father isn’t really the right word. These things are … can assume either sex. It was … Christ, there’s no point in trying to define it. It looked like a giant tortoise, as often as not, and if it had any more motivations than do the animalcules that you can see through a microscope in a drop of vinegar, it’s news to me. I’ve studied … his … species for years, but I still can’t see motivations behind the consistencies.”

Crawford thought of the cold woman, of her ageless beauty. “Which of you is the elder?”

Shelley’s grin widened, but looked even less cheerful. “That’s hard to say. Our mother gave birth to both of us on the same day, so you could say we’re twins. But her seed was implanted in my mother’s womb long before mine was—these things must have a longer gestation period—so it would be just as valid to say she’s older. But then again she lived as a sort of encysted stone in my abdomen for nineteen years, until 1811, when I managed to cut her out of myself—you must have noticed, the other day, the scar from my ‘caesarean'—so you could say she’s younger than I am. The only thing I can say with any assurance is that we did have the same mother.” He laughed and shook his head ruefully. “At least for you it wasn’t incest.”

Crawford was suddenly light-headed with jealousy. “You—” he choked, “when did you—”

“The stones have ears. Let’s talk out on the lake.” Shelley waved toward the boat.

Crawford turned to the knobby post around which the painter was tied, and for the first time noticed that the top of it had been crudely carved into the form of a grimacing human head, and that several long iron nails had been pounded into the face … long ago, to judge by the black rust-lines that streaked the splintered visage like tears.

“That’s a mazze,” called Shelley, from behind him. “The word’s Italian for ‘club.’ You see a lot of them in the Valais, southeast of here.”

Crawford was gingerly untying the rope from around the thing. “What’s it for?”

“Back in the fifteenth century, when the Swiss were breaking free of the

Hapsburgs, those things were a sort of roster for the rebels; if you wanted to go fight the oppressors, you indicated it by pounding a nail—an eisener breche, they called them—into one of these heads.”

Crawford touched one of the nails. It rocked in its hole, and impulsively he pulled it out of the face and put it into his pocket.

Shelley was taking in the freed rope, and Crawford stepped aboard before the vessel could drift out of reach. The wooden hoops around the mast clattered as the sail was raised, and then, even as Crawford settled himself comfortably on the thwart, Shelley was deftly working the sheet to put the bow around into the wind and begin tacking out away from shore. The sky had already darkened to the color of wet ash.

“When did,” Crawford began, but his voice came out too shrill; he swallowed, and then in a more normal tone he said, “when did you … sleep with her?”

“Long before you married her,” Shelley assured him. “Actually it was shortly after her birth—her birth from me, that is. I met her on the street, and I made myself believe that it … that what I had cut out of myself had been nothing more than a stone—I do suffer from bladder stones.”

Shelley twitched at the mainsail sheet, and the boat leaned as it skated out across the face of the lake. “I made myself believe,” he went on, “that this woman who had sought me out couldn’t have anything to do with that bloody lump, that diseased rib, that I had flung into the street a couple of months before. But of course they were one and the same … though it was very difficult for her to maintain a human form back then. Even now she has to relapse into something else … rocky or reptilian … after any length of time.” The wind shifted, and he smoothly let the shift become a change to a fresh tack. “It was my first sexual experience.”

“And have you … had her, since?” It made Crawford’s teeth hurt to ask.

“No. It was—no offense, but it was too horrible to want to repeat. She was too nearly me, after all those years of living inside me, and it was like masturbation—having sex with the dark side of myself.”

“Too horrible?” Crawford’s hands had clenched. “Can you swim?”

“No, I can’t—and you’d harm her, very likely kill her, if you drowned me. We’re twins, remember, and very closely linked. But I didn’t seek you out this evening in order to insult her. Do you—”

“You’re the second—no, third!—person who has thought I’m married to her,” Crawford interrupted. “Why do you think that?”

Shelley glanced over at him quizzically. “Well, because she’s let me know, for one thing. And you’re missing your wedding-ring finger, which is generally a sign of being married to one of these—as a matter of fact, wedding bands were originally a symbolic protection against succubae, the idea being that that finger was thus banded with metal to the body. And you’ve got a different look from all the people who are just prey for these things—a practiced observer can always recognize a member of the family.”

The shore had so receded behind them that Crawford, looking back, couldn’t make out the dock anymore, and Shelley let the sail spill the wind; within moments the boat had rocked to a stop and was drifting. Crawford thought he caught a hint of light and movement in the sky, but when he looked up there was nothing to see except the dark clouds.

Shelley looked up too, a little nervously. “Wild lamiae? We ought to be protected from them, at least, now that she’s here—though one almost drowned me on this lake a couple of months ago.” A minute went by in silence, and he relaxed.

“So,” Shelley went on, “you did marry her. They can’t initiate it, there has to have been a token of invitation on your part. I wonder why you can’t remember it. Did you … I don’t know, speak marriage vows to a rock, put a wedding ring on a winged lizard …” He grinned. “… have sex with a statue in a church?”

Crawford’s stomach had gone cold. “Christ!” he whispered. “Yes, I did!”

Shelley’s eyebrows were halfway to his hairline. “Really? A statue in a church? I don’t mean to seem vulgarly curious, but—”

“No, no, I put a wedding ring on the finger of a statue. In Warnham, a month ago. And when I went back, late at night, to get it, the—later I decided it was a dream—the statue’s hand was closed, so I couldn’t get the ring off.”

“That was it,” said Shelley flatly. “That was her. And it wasn’t as … random an action, I’ll wager, as you imagine; just like the loss of your finger, hmm? She was there, she was directing things. She needed a vehicle aboard which to follow me to Europe, so she maneuvered you into volunteering to be one.”

“Did she kill my wife? The woman I married the next day, who … who was killed on our wedding night, while I slept?”

Shelley bared his teeth in a snarl of sympathy. “Christ, did that happen? Yes, it has to have been her. She’s … a jealous god.” He tugged at his hair. “There was a girl I was interested in in Scotland, in 1811, shortly after I cut my sister out of myself; Mary Jones the girl’s name was. My sister killed her—tore her to pieces. The authorities said it must have been done with big sheep shears, and they picked the biggest, stupidest citizen as the culprit, but anyone could see that no human being with anything less than a, a cannon could have so destroyed the girl’s body.”

“Right, exactly,” Crawford said in a clipped whisper, “that’s what happened to Julia. But you know something? I’m … not sorry. Damn me for saying it, but I’m not sorry. I mean, I wish Julia were still alive, that is, I wish I’d never met her—I wish I had known I was marrying her, the … the cold woman, your sister, so that I could simply have avoided Julia. Is that horrible of me?”

“Profoundly, yes.” Shelley shifted around, draping an arm over the tiller bar. “But I’m glad to hear that you feel that way—it means you’ll probably cooperate with the plan I have in mind. You see, I have a wife and children—and, on top of that, I’m about to get a divorce and re-marry; and my half sister, your wife, will kill all of these people if she can, just as she killed your Julia. But she can’t cross water, especially salt water, by herself—she’s got to ride across with a human to whom she’s closely related: by blood, as in my case, or by marriage, as in yours. Now, she married you in order to chase me across the channel—”

“That’s a lie,” Crawford said.

Shelley gave him a pitying look. “Very well, it’s a lie. In any case, wouldn’t you like to make sure that when I return to England she stays here with you, and doesn’t ride back across the channel with me?”

“She wouldn’t,” said Crawford, his voice louder and belligerent. “You’re just flattering yourself. Go ahead, go back to England—she won’t follow you.”

“You’re probably right,” said Shelley soothingly. “I’m sure you are. But why don’t you help me make it certain, by just cooperating with me on a couple of … procedures. Nothing complicated, I got my wife to do them just before I left England in May. I just want you to—”

“I don’t have to physically bind her to me—and I won’t insult her, and shame myself, by trying.”

Shelley stared at him, and though it was too dark to see clearly, his expression seemed to be one of bewilderment. “Very well. Right. Then let’s put it this way—how would you like to learn, learn from her brother, remember, what sorts of behavior you should avoid, if you want to keep her? What she likes, what she hates?”

“I don’t need this.” Crawford stood up, rocking the boat. “And I know how to swim.”

He dove over the side.

The lake water was cold, and seemed to clear his head of the feverish complacency that had been surrounding him like a warm fog; now there was just panic. I should climb right back aboard, he thought, and find out how to keep her from following him … and then do the opposite. How can I want to keep her? My God, she killed Julia! And now somehow you—

His head broke the surface of the water and he was breathing the evening air, and he forgot all about going back to the boat. The prospect of swimming several hundred yards while wearing boots and a coat didn’t seem daunting, and he turned toward the shore they’d embarked from and began crawling through the water with a steady, ponderous stroke. Behind him Shelley was calling to him, but he didn’t bother to listen.

As he swam, the water seemed gradually to become a denser fluid, like mercury—so that he floated higher and could propel himself along with less effort, almost as if the water were repelling him; and a warm wind had sprung up at his back, thrusting at his clothes and hair and lending him impetus. Thank you, he thought to the mountains and the sky. Thank you, my new family.

Shelley tried to follow him, but the wind over the lake was impossibly erratic, and finally he had to let the sail flap loose. His night-vision had been diminishing ever since he had taken the knife to his own lower ribs in 1811, but he could still see well enough to make out the wide whirlwind that drew spray up in a dim funnel and centered on the receding lump of agitation that was his brother-in-law.

Simultaneous lightning crazed the night sky over the Jura on one horizon and Mont Blanc on the other, and a few moments later the thunder rolled back and forth across the lake, sounding to Shelley like the majestic laughter of the mountains.

For the next week Crawford never went out by day. Often when the sun had set behind the black slopes of the Jura he would climb up the rocky foothills by starlight, or slouch down the steep cobblestoned lanes to the shore of the lake, and then just wander aimlessly. He was acutely aware of smells now, relishing the wild spice scents of the upland flowers, and repulsed by the smoke that whirled away along the shore at dusk when the returned fishermen were cooking their garlicky sausages. There were no tourists out here, and the locals seemed to hurry away when he approached them, and so whole days went by without his speaking a word.

The memories of his past life had lost their driving power—his only concern these days was to be back in his room every evening by midnight for the arrival of her.

And he had only one worry, but it was a consuming one—she was becoming less substantial. The dreams were losing their vividness, and he could find only the faintest red spots now when he looked for her bites in the mornings; he treasured the memory of the first bite, and sentimentally kept picking at it so that it wouldn’t heal.

He had never turned the mirror back to face the room, but he knew what he would see if he did—the bright, ill-looking eyes and hectically spotted cheeks that distinguished the faces of so many of the people he’d been meeting lately.

When he came back up the hill on the tenth night, he found half a dozen people awaiting him outside the rooming house. One of them was the old woman who owned the place. His bag had been packed, and it sat on the grass behind them.

“You cannot stay here any longer,” said the landlady clearly in French. “You did not tell me that you are consumptive. The quarantine laws are very strict—you must go to the hospitals.”

Crawford shook his head, impatient to get upstairs. “It is not genuine consumption,” he managed to reply in the same language. “Honestly, I am a doctor, and I can assure you that I suffer from an entirely different malady, one that—”

“One that can perhaps bring worse things yet down upon us,” said the burly man nearest Crawford’s bag. “The teeth of the middle.”

For a moment Crawford thought the man was making a reference to his bitten finger stump, but then he remembered that that was the name of a cluster of nearby mountains: the Dents du Midi.

Crawford was afraid it might be midnight now, and that she might be waiting for him … or not waiting. “Look,” he said unsteadily in English, “I’ve paid for the goddamn room, and I’m going to—”

He tried to push past them, but an outflung palm thrust him back with such force that he wound up sitting on the grass well behind where he’d been standing. His portmanteau thudded onto the ground next to him.

“Within my grandfather’s lifetime people like you were burned alive,” the landlady called. “Be grateful that you are simply required to leave.”

“But it’s the middle of the night!” Crawford gasped, still nearly breathless from the push. “Uh, mais, c’est en pleíne nuit! They close the Geneva gates at ten! What do you expect me to—”

The burly man pulled something silvery out from under his coat, but Crawford didn’t wait to see whether it was a crucifix or a knife; rolling painfully to his feet, he seized his bag and, wheezing curses, limped away down the hill.

He hoped to walk to Geneva and talk or bribe his way into the city, and then get a room somewhere, but she came to him while he was still on the road.

He had his portmanteau slung over his back as he strode along, and all at once it seemed to grow shockingly heavy; he fell under its sudden weight and rolled several yards down the lakeward slope … and then, with an overwhelming burst of gladness, he realized that the glowing-eyed creature that was crouched on his back and lowering its open mouth toward his neck was her. And he was awake—this was no dream.

When her teeth punctured the skin of his throat he was abruptly somewhere else … even someone else. He was lying on a bed, and he knew he was on the west coast of France, booked to sail for Portsmouth tomorrow. Mary Godwin, his wife-to-be, slept beside him, but his thoughts tonight were of his present wife, Harriet, and their two children, all three of whom he had left behind in England. Then he became aware that his thoughts were being monitored, and he hastily closed his mind … and Crawford was himself again, sprawled across the dewy grass slope under the stars while the cold woman drew hot blood from his throat.

He realized dimly that the flow of his blood into her had briefly linked his mind to Shelley’s.

But now she was speaking to him in his mind, and he forgot everything else. She didn’t use words, but he learned that she had to go away somewhere to fulfill a five-year-old promise, and that there were only two vessels available to her for such a voyage—and one of them was leaving now. She would give his … name, face, identity … to certain sorts of … people, who would try to protect him if he got into danger.

And he had better be … faithful to her.

He tried to remonstrate, to tell her how much he needed her, but even though he shouted at her, staring into her weirdly luminous eyes as her ivory face hovered over him, he wasn’t sure she heard him.

Eventually she left him, but it was too cold on the grassy hillside for him to go to sleep. He got to his feet, refastened his clothes and, with infinite weariness, resumed his interrupted walk to Geneva.

In Le Havre, in northern France, Percy Shelley stepped aboard the ship that was to take him to England …

… And Crawford was alone. She was gone, not only somewhere else but not watching over him anymore. The night was instantly darker; his night-vision had suddenly diminished, and he began dragging his feet as he walked so that he could feel the texture of the road and notice if he strayed off it.

Shelley had been right after all—and had failed to leave her on this side of the channel.

CHAPTER 8

I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

Who cry’d—'La belle Dame sans merci

Hath thee in thrall!’

I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke, and found me here

On the cold hill side.

—John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci

… seals—necklaces—balls &c.—& I know not

what—formed of Chrystals—Agates—and other stones—all

of from Mont Blanc bought & brought by me on & from

the spot—expressly for you to divide among yourself and the

children …

—Lord Byron,

to Augusta Leigh, 8 September 1816

Lord Byron didn’t appreciate having to be up early and having to be in a carriage with Dr. Polidori; either burden alone, he felt, he could have taken, indeed often had taken, in stride—but both at once today was asking too much. He really couldn’t be held to blame if he lost his temper.

Byron’s gigantic travelling carriage was making poor headway through the traffic around Geneva’s north gate; the carriage had been built in England, copied from the celebrated one of Napoleon’s that had been captured at Genappe, and it contained a bed and a table and silverware … but it was an unwieldy vehicle for maneuvering through crowds.

The young physician didn’t seem to mind the delay, though. Polidori had done a lot of strenuous exercises before they had set out, making a show of his disciplined gasping, and now he was squinting at the distant mountains visible against the blue sky behind the gables and spires of the town, and he was whispering under his breath.

Byron couldn’t stand it. He knew that it was some wretched bit of the physician’s own verse that he was reciting. Why did the man have to have literary ambitions?

Mostly because the physician disapproved, Byron poured himself another glass of Fendant wine.

Sure enough, Polidori glanced over at him and frowned. “That’s your fifth glass of wine today, my lord, and you’ve only been up for a couple of hours!” He cleared his throat. “It has been … medically and mathematically proven, that wine, in excessive amounts, has … catastrophic effects in the … digestive sphere—”

“When I meet a man with a digestive sphere, Pollydolly, I’ll send him straight to you. What I’ve got is a stomach, and it’s partial to drink.” He held the wine up to the sunlight and admired the way the sun made an amber smoldering in the glass. “Liquor’s an old friend of mine, and it’s never betrayed my trust.”

Polidori shrugged sulkily and resumed staring out the window; his lower lip was sticking out more than usual, but at least he had stopped his sotto voce recitations.

Byron grinned sourly, remembering an exchange he’d had with the envious young physician four months ago, when the two of them had been travelling up the Rhine. “After all,” Polidori had said, “what is there that you can do that I cannot?” Byron had grinned and stretched languorously. “Why, since you force me to say,” he had answered, “I think there are three things.” Of course Polidori had hotly demanded to know what they could be. “Well,” Byron had replied, “I can swim across this river … and I can snuff out a candle with a pistol ball at a distance of twenty paces … and I can write a poem of which fourteen thousand copies sell in one day.”

That had been fun; especially since Polidori had been unable to argue. Byron demonstrably had done all those things—except swim the Rhine, but he was known to be a powerful swimmer, who had once swum across the mile of treacherous sea between Sestos and Abydos in Turkey—and Polidori couldn’t even claim to be able to do one of them. That dialogue, like this morning’s, had sent the young physician into a sulk.

The crowd had finally opened up in front of them, and Byron’s driver was able to whip up the horses and get the carriage out through the gate.

“Finally,” snapped Polidori, shifting awkwardly on his seat as if to imply that

the carriage’s construction ought to have provided passengers with more room.

Just to annoy the young man further, Byron leaned forward and opened the communication panel. “Stop a moment, would you please, Maurice,” he called to the driver. He was about to say that he wanted to let the horses rest for a while; but then, glancing out the window, he saw an arm and the back of a head showing like nearly submerged reefs above the sea of daisies along the side of the road.

“What now, my lord?” sighed Polidori.

“It’s some physician you are,” Byron told him sternly. “People are dying by the side of the road, and all you can be bothered to do is recite poetry and tell me about digestive trapezohedrons.”

Polidori was aware that he was missing something. He blinked out of one of the windows in what would have been, if aimed in the right direction, a brave show of alertness. “… People dying?” he mumbled.

Byron was already out of the carriage and limping across the grassy shoulder. “Over here, you imbecile. Exercise your arts on this poor—” He paused, for he had rolled the limp body over, and he recognized the face.

So did Polidori, who came stumping up then. “Why, it’s just that false doctor who nearly gave Shelley pneumonia! Did I tell you I made some inquiries, and found out that he’s actually a veterinarian? I expect he’s just drunk. There’s no—”

Byron had looked closely at the wasted face, though, and was remembering how close he had come to a similar disaster in his youth—and he remembered too the protective carnelian-quartz heart a friend had subsequently given him, and the strangely crystalline skull he himself had later dug up at his family estate and had made into a goblet.

“Lift him inside,” Byron said softly.

“What, a drunk?” protested Polidori. “On your famous upholstery? Let’s just leave word—”

“I said get him inside!” Byron roared. “And pour some wine into that amethyst cup that’s packed in the same case with my pistols! And then,” he went on gently, putting his hand on the startled young physician’s shoulder, “calculate how much I owe you. Your services are no longer required.”

For a moment Polidori was speechless. Then, “What?” he sputtered. “Are you mad, m’lord? A veterinarian? Not even a surgeon, as he claimed that day, but an animal doctor? To replace me, a graduate of Edinburgh University? Five glasses of wine in a morning, no wonder you’re talking this way! As your physician, I’m afraid I must—”

Byron had certainly not intended to hire this unconscious person as Polidori’s replacement, but the young man’s denunciation of such a course made him perversely seize upon it. “I have,” he said in his coldest tone, easily overriding Polidori’s shrill protests, “no further right as an employer to ask you to do anything; but as a fellow human being I’m asking you to help me carry my new personal doctor into my carriage.”

Though choking with rage and perhaps weeping, Polidori complied, and in a few moments Michael Crawford was sleepily spilling wine down his throat and his muddy shirt-front while sitting on the leather upholstery of Byron’s carriage. Soon the vehicle was under way again, and Polidori was walking shakily back toward the gates of the city of Geneva.

Crawford expected the wine to hit him hard, what with his empty stomach and weakened constitution—but instead it seemed to clear his head and restore some of his strength. He emptied the cup, and Byron refilled it.

“I told you to come to me for help, if you needed it,” Byron said.

“Thank you—but I didn’t need any until last night.”

Byron stared at him, and Crawford knew he was considering his thin face and fever-bright eyes. “Really.” Byron sighed and leaned back, replacing the bottle in the sloshing ice bucket on the floor. “What happened last night?”

Crawford looked speculatively at Byron, noting for the first time Byron’s own symptoms—the pale skin, the intense eyes. “I lost my—” What, he couldn’t precisely say wife; protector? Lover?

But Byron was nodding knowingly. “Not for long, you haven’t,” he said, “unless you climbed one of these mountains between then and now. How long has it been since … ‘melancholy marked you for her own'?”

“Since …? Oh. A month or so.”

“Huh.” Byron refilled his own more mundane glass with a not-quite-steady hand. “You must have been bitten hard, to get here so quickly. I’ve been their prey since I was fifteen.”

Crawford raised his eyebrows, reflecting that these poets tended to have drawn the deadly attentions of their vampires very young—Keats had fallen into the power of his at birth, and Shelley had been consecrated to them before he had even emerged from his mother’s womb!

Byron was staring at him. “Yes, that is young. It took me a long time to get here.” He drank some more of his wine and squinted out his window at the lake.

“I do owe you help,” he said quietly, perhaps to himself; then he sighed and turned to Crawford. “My family estate was some kind of focus for the things—there are such places even in England, ask Shelley sometime—and one of them made his tenancy legal by actually renting the place. Hah! Lord Grey de Ruthyn, he called himself. He liked me, and wanted me to live there with him—my mother thought that was prestigious, and made me go, and he knocked on the door of my room the first night I spent there. Like a lunatic I invited him in … but it was my mother’s fault too.”

He frowned and lifted the bottle out of the bucket again, then stared at the dripping label. “Of course she paid for it later,” he remarked, “as the families of people like us generally do. Did you know that? And Lord Grey has been … attending to me ever since, in one form or other, one sex or the other.”

He shuddered and poured some of the wine into his glass. “But now my sister, half sister, actually, has begun to show the symptoms of his attentions, and I won’t have that. And Claire’s fetus is mine, and even my bastards won’t suffer it if I can prevent it.”

“Can you prevent it?” asked Crawford. “Without dying yourself?”

“I hope to. Switzerland is dangerous—they seem to have a stronger foothold in this country than anywhere else—but I believe that at the same time, ironically, it’s possible here to climb up out of their field of power, and throw off their yoke.” He pointed at Crawford’s cup. “Drinking wine from an amethyst cup is a good way to start.”

Crawford remembered something Keats had told him in the Galatea. “I thought neffers liked to do that—and they certainly don’t want to … throw off any yoke. They seem to be seeking that yoke.”

“Neffers?” Byron seemed amused by the word. “I know the sort of people you mean—God knows I’ve been hounded by them. One of them, Lady Caroline Lamb, cut her hand at a ball I was at four years ago, and waved her bloody fingers at me, to entice me. Christ. At any rate, they misunderstand the real nature of the quartzes. Some tantalizing dreams can be induced by the uses of them, but such dreams are just … echoes still ringing in the remoter halls of a castle after the inhabitants are long gone. Some crystals can give more vivid echoes than others, but none of them can recall the departed tenants; in fact, such crystals tend to repel a living member of the nephelim. Not that there are many such left anymore.”

Crawford took a deep sip of the wine, and he could feel alertness and energy trickling back into him. “Nephelim?”

“You’re not a biblical scholar,” Byron observed. “The nephelim were the ‘giants in the earth’ they had in those days, the descendants of Lilith, who sometimes laid with the sons and daughters of men—it’s one of the ways they can reproduce, through human wombs. Ask Shelley about that, sometime, too, but catch him when he’s tranquil. They’re the creatures God promised to protect us from when He hung the rainbow in the sky as a sign of his covenant.”

“I thought that was a promise of no more floods.”

“No—did you ever read the Greek version of the flood? Deucalion and Pyrrha?” The carriage shook as it crossed an unevenness in the road, and some of the wine splashed out of Byron’s glass onto his shirt front, but he didn’t appear to notice.

“Of course. They were the only survivors of the flood, and the oracle told them to repopulate the earth by throwing behind them the bones of their mother; and they figured out that the mother being referred to was the earth, so they threw stones behind them as they walked across the mud,” Crawford’s voice was becoming more thoughtful, “and the stones they threw became humans.”

The image of throwing stones had reminded him of St. Stephen, who had been stoned to death, and suddenly he was sure that the phrase loaves of St. Stephen referred to stones—dangerous stones.

“Almost right,” Byron said. “That’s actually a much older story, which those primeval historians confused with their own stories about a relatively recent flood. The things that the stones turned into looked like people—it’s mimicry—but they were this other species, the nephelim. The rainbow, I’m told, is a reference to the fact that the nature of sunlight changed sometime, God knows when, and now it’s bad for them—in heavy doses it can even crystallize them, freeze them where they stand. They turn into a sort of dirty quartz. Lot’s wife was one of these creatures, and that’s what happened to her—it wasn’t actually salt that she became a pillar of.”

“So quartz crystals repel them because they’re … bits of dead friends?”

“More than that.” Visibly drunk by now, Byron waved his hand in the air as he groped for an analogy. “If you were a glass of water in which three dozen spoonfuls of sugar had been dissolved, would you—I don’t know—collect rock candy?”

“Uh … oh! I get it! It might provoke the whole glassful into crystallizing.”

“Exactly. I don’t think it’s a rig bisque … uh, a big risk for them, and I’ve heard that unless they’re diminished they can change to crystal or stone and back again without any … with relative impunity, but it does repel them.” He nodded heavily and pointed at Crawford’s cup. “And wine drunk from an amethyst cup, amethyst being a quartz, is a tiny but real first step in freeing yourself. It will help clear you of the fevers those creatures induce—so drink up.” Byron blinked at him owlishly. “Assuming, that is, that you want to be rid of the creature that did this to you.”

Crawford raised the cup, then hesitated; he licked his lips nervously, and his forehead was suddenly chilly with sweat—but a moment later he tilted the cup up and drained it in three big swallows, and held it out for a refill.

“That’s a start. You have a family? Brothers, sisters?”

Crawford shook his head.

“No? There’s no twin-half, no mirror image, that you’re trying to save? Then you must be split yourself—one of the ones who is ‘like two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art.’

Oddly, Crawford found himself remembering the raised figures on the oatcake Josephine had refused to break. He shrugged, then asked, “Are you a twin of this sister of yours?”

Byron seemed suddenly ill at ease; he answered with an air of duty, as if he owed some degree of honesty to Crawford. “Well, almost closer than that—it’s all my own fault, but it’s why Lord Grey is so jealous. These things are jealous, you know—they don’t want you to love any being but themselves, not even yourself. That must be why they attack families—our families are extensions of us.” He shook his head sombrely. “Poor Augusta. I’ve got to get free of this creature.”

Though it was just the sort of thing they had come to the Continent to see, few of the English tourists who were clustered on the couches in the lobby of the Hôtel d’Angleterre had succeeded in getting a glimpse of the infamous Lord Byron or his friend Shelley, who habitually listed his occupation as “atheist” in hotel registers. Rumor had it that the two men were living carnally with two sisters in a house across the lake, but hired boat excursions and rented telescopes had all failed to make the private lives of the pair accessible to the public.

So Polidori found an audience when, over a restorative bottle of mineral water, he began describing how badly his former employer had treated him. Most of his listeners wanted stories to bring home about the daughters of William Godwin, but one young woman pushed through the crowd that jostled around the young physician to ask for more details about the drunk who had caused Polidori to lose his position this morning.

“That was the craziest thing I ever saw Lord Byron do,” declared Polidori, shaking his head. “This man claimed to be a doctor when we first saw him three weeks ago, a Navy doctor, but I got a look at his passport. His real name is Michael Aickman, and he’s—” Polidori paused for effect. “—a veterinarian.”

Laughter and bemused head-shakings followed this, and then one old fellow revived the laughter by opining that an animal doctor was perhaps the most appropriate attendant for such as Byron and Shelley; but the girl who had asked the question turned away, abrupt as a weathervane in a sudden gale, and walked stiffly to the opposite side of the lobby—she sat down on a bench and, in a quick series of tiny releases and catches, lowered her head into her hands.

After several minutes of deep breathing, Josephine Carmody was able to raise her head.

It had been a shock to learn that Michael Crawford was so close—this had to be him, she had tracked him as far as this city—and the shock had now knocked her back, for the first time in nearly two months, into her Josephine personality.

For most of the fifty-seven days since Julia’s murder, she had been the woman-shaped machine, thoughtlessly and automatically following Crawford’s trail east across France to Switzerland.

A few times she had been Julia, and that had not been too bad. When she’d been Julia she had had to use her money, any money there might have been, to check into hotels and get cleaned up and buy clothes. Always she had inquired at the desk if there were any messages from her husband, Michael Crawford—and always she was told that there were not any, and she decided to press on and meet him “at a later point in our itinerary.”

Sometimes when she was Julia she would write cheery notes home to her mother, who had always been a prey to melancholy, and was particularly sad now that her only daughter was married and moving away from home. Julia’s father had told her that her mother blamed herself for the death of Julia’s twin sister, who had died at birth. Julia thought this was awfully sensitive and motherly of the old darling, but at the same time unrealistic. Why, the whole thing might have turned out so much worse! The second twin could very easily have been born alive, but at the expense of Julia’s mother’s life!

It was the Julia personality that she hoped eventually to occupy for the rest of her life, as soon as Josephine or the machine had succeeded in killing Michael Crawford.

His death had to come first, of course, for she could hardly inhabit a world that also contained the man who had … who had done something that it was impossible for her to think about, something to negate Julia’s very existence. A bed soaked in blood, piled with terrible fleshy ruin …

She flailed her mind away from the inadmissible image.

When Crawford was killed and erased from the world, she would be able to relax and be Julia. She knew she could do it—hadn’t she had lots of practice?

She touched the lump under her dress that was the pistol, and smiled jerkily. She stood up all in one movement and marched out of the lobby with a precision a soldier might have envied … though several men looked after her uneasily, and one small boy burst into tears as she went scissoring past him.

It wasn’t until night fell that Crawford began to miss the cold woman.

At first he wasn’t sure what was bothering him—he thought it might be the measured thudding of Byron’s foil tip against the wooden silhouette on the wall of the dining room, but when Crawford took his wine out onto the balcony and stared down the slope at the darkening lake, it seemed to be the birds and the wind in the orchard that had him on edge. He drained his glass and went back inside for the bottle, but when he had refilled the glass and emptied it twice he knew that it wasn’t drunkenness he wanted. And he wasn’t hungry, and he wasn’t any more worried than usual about his situation.

He was leaning against the railing with increasing pressure, and he wondered if his problem could be simple sexual deprivation … and then he knew what it was that was missing. He missed her, and the orgasmic amnesia that had for three weeks freed him from his intolerable memories of a boat in heavy surf, and of a burning house, and of an unthinkably mutilated body in a bed.

But she was gone, and had forbidden him to follow her … and he didn’t want to follow her, anyway. He swore to himself that he didn’t.

For the first time in quite a while he thought of Julia, and of how totally he had failed to avenge her—he had, for God’s sake, gone to bed with her murderer, and then told Shelley that he wasn’t particularly sorry about the way things had worked out.

Rain began spotting the rail and coldly tapping the backs of his hands; he shoved them into his coat pockets, and the fingers of his right hand curled around some small, gritty object. A sudden wind blew the wet hair back from his forehead as he pulled the thing out and turned it over in his palm, but it wasn’t until lightning flared distantly out over the lake that he recognized the ancient, rusted nail he had pulled out of the wooden face nine days ago. The nail’s head proved to be broad and flat enough for it to stand on the rail with its point toward the sky.

He held his right hand out flat, as though about to lay it on a Bible for the taking of an oath, and then he lowered it until the cold point dented his palm.

He pressed down very slowly, and felt his skin painfully stretch and then abruptly part; and by the time another person’s hand slapped his forearm from below, knocking Crawford’s hand up and sending the nail spinning away into the darkness, he had been able to feel the iron probing between the metacarpal bones.

He turned and saw Byron behind him, silhouetted against the yellow glow of the windows. Byron had tucked the fencing foil under his arm, and the bell-guard and grip bobbed in front of him now as though he’d been run through.

“No, my friend, believe me, patience is all that’s required,” Byron said softly, taking Crawford’s left elbow and leading him toward the doors. “I can assure you that if you’ll only wait, the world will flay you much more thoroughly than you ever could yourself.”

Back inside, Byron tossed the foil onto a couch and poured wine into two fresh glasses. A couple of dogs wandered into the high-ceilinged room, followed after a moment by one of Byron’s tame monkeys; neither man paid them any attention, and the animals began tossing couch pillows around.

“What were you punishing yourself for?” Byron asked Crawford in a conversational tone as he handed him a glass.

Crawford took it in his right hand, and blood quickly slicked the base and ran unnoticed down his sleeve. He considered the question as he drank. “Deaths I did nothing to prevent,” he said finally.

Byron grinned, but in such a fellow-soldierly way that Crawford couldn’t take offense. “People close to you?”

“Brother … wife … and wife.” Crawford took a deep, ragged breath. “I tell you, seeing that thing, that vampire, recede … is like watching a tide recede from some evil waterfront. All the horrible old skeletons and wrecks and deformed creatures are exposed to the sun and the air, and you would rather have drowned in the high tide—than lived to see these terrible things again.”

“You’re a fugitive?”

Crawford considered lying, but then decided that sometimes one fugitive could trust another. He nodded.

“And a genuine doctor?”

Crawford nodded again. “The veterinary story, the whole Michael Aickman identity, is … a pose. My real name is—”

Byron shook his head. “I don’t want to know.”

The monkey had snatched both of the cushions and climbed up onto the back of the couch, to the noisy outrage of the dogs. A tall, burly man strode into the room, saw the disturbance and crossed to the couch.

“Damn it, Byron, you’re running a bestial pandemonium here!” he called, having to speak loudly because the monkey was protesting his attempts to take the cushions away.

“That’s old news, Hobby,” replied Byron. “Ask any of the tourists at the d’Angleterre.” He limped back to the table and poured a third glass and held it out to the newcomer. “This is my new medical man, by the way—Michael, this is John Cam Hobhouse—John, Michael Aickman.”

“Got rid of that idiot Polidori, did you? Good work.” Hobhouse pried both cushions out of the monkey’s grip and pitched them through the open doorway. The animals all scrambled after them in a rush, and the room was suddenly quieter. He took the glass and sat down on the couch and stared at Crawford. “Do you write poetry? Dramas?”

The question surprised Crawford, for during the past couple of months he had found himself composing verses in his head—it always happened at night, while he was waiting for sleep to take him, and it was always as involuntary as the jerking of a limb during a dream of falling; but he hadn’t written any of the verses down, so he shook his head. “Not me.”

“Thank God.”

“Hobhouse has always been a steadying influence on me,” said Byron. “He kept me out of scandals when we were adolescents at Cambridge, and two weeks ago he came here all the way from England just to chase Claire Clairmont away.”

Hobhouse laughed. “I’m honored if my arrival had that effect.”

“Hobby was even groomsman at my wedding, and it certainly wasn’t his fault that I turned out to be marrying a modern Clytemnestra.”

Crawford recalled that, in Aeschylus’s Orestia, Clytemnestra had been the wife and murderess of Agamemnon. “Some of us just shouldn’t attempt marriage,” he said with a smile.

Byron looked at him sharply. After a moment he said, “I’m about ready to leave Switzerland … move on south to Italy. How does that sound to you?”

The idea made Crawford obscurely uncomfortable, as Byron seemed to have known it would. “I … don’t know,” Crawford said. He glanced through the window into the night. I can’t, had been his first thought; this is where she’ll come looking for me, when she comes back.

His face reddened as he realized it, and he reminded himself that he wanted to be rid of her—wanted, as a matter of fact, to stay here for a while to test Byron’s idea that the nephelim shackles could be shaken off in the high Alps.

“But before we go,” Byron went on, “I want to take a tour of the Bernese Alps. I spent a day on Mont Blanc recently with Hobhouse and another friend, but I don’t yet feel that I’ve really made the … beneficial acquaintance of these mountains.” He winked at Crawford, as though to imply that there was a meaning in his words that was for Crawford alone. “Hobhouse tells me he’s free to come along for the trip—are you?”

Crawford exhaled with relief. “Yes,” he said, trying to sound casual.

Byron nodded. “You’re wiser than Shelley. I think the only way to be quit of the sirens is to answer the call, go right up into their pre-Adamite castles, and then by the grace of God come back down alive and sane. To go back without having done that is to … come to terms with an illness, rather than get a cure.”

Hobhouse snorted impatiently at what he clearly considered to be a snatch of poetic nonsense—but Crawford, who knew something about illness and cures, shivered and gulped his wine.

CHAPTER 9

The stones are sealed across their places;

One shadow is shed on all their faces,

One blindness cast on all their eyes.

—A. C. Swinburne, Ilicet

The rain continued throughout the next day, and it seemed to Crawford that Byron spent most of the day limping up and down the damp stone stairs and shouting at people; the irascible lord found fault with the way the servants were packing his clothes, and he kept changing his mind about what dainties he wanted the cook to stock the travelling-basket with and, having splashed through the courtyard to the stables, he swore aloud at the grooms’ perverse inability to grasp his instructions about how the horses should be harnessed.

Crawford, who had encountered such masters on shipboard, expected to see in the servants’ faces the resentful stubbornness that promised slow and minimal work, but Byron’s servants just rolled their eyes and grinned and tried to follow their employer’s most recent instructions; clearly Byron inspired at least as much loyalty as irritation among them.

The following morning dawned sunny, and the touring party managed to set out at seven o’clock. Crawford sat with Byron and Hobhouse and Byron’s valet in a big, open charabanc carriage, rocking sleepily on the cold leather upholstery and blinking back through the dappled sunlight at the grooms and servants who were bringing along the saddle horses. Crawford was glad the monkey had been left behind with the house staff.

All day they travelled eastward along the road that skirted the north shore of the lake, and when dusk had claimed all of the landscape except the distant rose-lit peaks of Mont Blanc and the Aiguille d’Argentière, they stopped for the night at an inn in the port village of Ouchy, just below the blocked-out piece of sky where the lights and spires of Lausanne fretted the slope of Mont Jurat.

Byron retired early, but the sheets on his bed proved to be damp, and he spent ten minutes swearing and stripping them off and flinging them around before he finally wrapped himself up in a blanket and returned to bed.

The company was up, if grumbling, at five the next morning, and they were all dressed and fed and mounted and clattering away eastward while the workmen around the quay were still shovelling up frozen horse-droppings in the shadows of dawn; and only the highest pastures had begun to glow emerald in the peak-descending sunlight when the travellers, who had been aware of the dark face of the lake edging higher and higher up the embankment at their right, found the road ahead of them sheened with water, so that the trees bordering the right side of it seemed to have grown up out of the lake in single file, a sunrise phenomenon as wondrous as the rings of mushrooms Crawford remembered finding on dewy lawns when he was a boy in Scotland. To make the carriage lighter in case a wheel should find a submerged pothole, Crawford and Byron and Hobhouse got out and rode horses, and the horses’ hooves, splashing in the fetlock-deep water, made a wake that stretched far out across the brightening lake.

They spent that night at Clarens, on the east shore of the lake, and on the next day they hired pack mules and started into the mountains.

Breakfast was a stop under the pine trees on the slopes of Mont Davant. One of the servants started a fire and made a pot of coffee, and paper-wrapped pieces of last night’s chicken were passed around by Byron’s valet, and Byron himself circulated among the crouching company with a magnum bottle of cold white wine, filling up any cups that had been emptied of coffee.

Byron eventually sat down on a sunlit heap of brown pine needles near where Crawford was trying, for the first time in at least a week, to shave. Even though he had nothing but cold water, Crawford had managed to work up some lather from the cake of soap he’d borrowed from Hobhouse, and now he was carefully drawing a straight razor down his lean cheek. He had propped a small mirror on a fallen black branch that lay against a trunk, and after every slow razor-stroke he peered curiously at his reflection. Because of the altitude, or perhaps the early morning wine, his own face looked less familiar, and more like the face of some imbecile, every time he glanced at it.

When he was done he wiped his face on his coattail and took one last look in the mirror. By now he couldn’t recognize himself at all, and the visage in the mirror seemed to be nothing more than a bumpy blob of flesh with eyes and holes and dots of blood arranged randomly on it. He pondered it thoughtfully for several minutes.

“Did you ever notice,” he asked Byron finally, “how foolish your face looks?”

Byron glanced sharply up from his wine, obviously startled and angry. “No, Mister Aickman,” he said, “how foolish does my face look?”

“No no, I mean if you stare at your own face for long enough it stops looking familiar—or even like any face at all. It’s the same effect you get if you repeat your name over and over again; pretty soon the name sounds like nothing but frog croaks.” Crawford waved, a bit drunkenly, at the mirror. “I’ve been shaving, here, and now I can’t recognize myself at all.”

He was glad he had had several glasses of wine, for he found the bestial face in the mirror obscurely frightening.

Still frowning, Byron took the mirror and stared into it for nearly a full minute; finally he shook his head and handed it back. “It doesn’t work for me—though sometimes I wish I could fail to recognize myself.” He sipped his wine. “And it would certainly be a relief to be able to hear the syllables ‘By-ron’ without …” He made a fist.

“Without having to take it personally,” Crawford suggested. “Without it being a … call to the battlements.”

Byron grinned, and it occurred to Crawford for the first time that the poet was younger than himself. Crawford dropped the mirror into his jacket pocket and got up to return Hobhouse’s soap and razor.

They were attacked an hour later, when the road had become so steep that everybody had had to get out of the carriage and ride or walk, and even the baggage had been taken out of the boot and strapped onto the backs of the mules. Crawford was riding one of the saddle horses, alternately warmed and chilled as the horse climbed through slanting bars of sunlight and tree-shadow; ahead of him swayed one of the baggage-laden mules, and beyond it rode Byron, leading the plodding procession.

The horses moved slowly, audibly sniffing the cold air from time to time, though Crawford could smell only morning-damp earth and pine needles.

Crawford, still a little drunk, was singing a song that old des Loges had sung interminably on that day, nearly two months ago now, when Crawford had pulled him in a wagon from Carnac to Auray and back. The song, which of course Crawford knew only in des Loges’s debased dialect, recounted how badly the songwriter had been treated by the woman he loved.

After the first stanza had gone ringing away through the pine trees that towered up from the slopes above and below them, Byron reined in his horse to listen; and when Crawford came to a stanza in which the singer compared himself to laundry beaten on rocks in a stream, Byron let the mule pass him and then edged his own horse between Crawford’s and the road’s edge, so that he could comfortably talk to Crawford as they rode.

“Who set Villon to music?” Byron asked.

Crawford had heard of the fifteenth-century poet François Villon, but he’d never read him. “I didn’t even know that’s who wrote it,” he said. “I learned the song from an old madman in France.”

“It’s the ‘Double Ballade’ from The Testament,” said Byron thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I ever really paid attention to it before. Do you remember the rest?”

“I think so.”

Crawford began the next verse—which lamented the fact that even the penalties for practicing witchcraft wouldn’t deter young men from pursuing women like the one that ruined the singer—but suddenly and for no apparent reason his heart was pounding, and a dew of sweat had sprung out on his temples.

The wine, he thought—or the disquieting lyrics of the song.

Then the path shook to a heavy, splintering crash on the uphill slope at their right, and Crawford heard branches snapping and drifts of pine needles hissing like fire as something big came sliding down toward him.

Byron had just grabbed the reins of Crawford’s horse and tried to pull both of them back, out of the path of whatever was tumbling down the slope, when the thing roared like an earthquake and sprang at them.

Dazzled by the blue sky, Crawford wasn’t able to see the thing until, in midair, it erupted from the shadows—then he got an instant’s glimpse of a mad-faced, eyeless giant before the thing collided with him and punched him right out of the saddle.

The downhill slope was steep, and Crawford fell through four yards of chilly air before he hit the muddy slope; but he landed feetfirst and slid, and so it was his feet and legs and rump that took the worst of the beating against the low branches and upward-projecting rocks; and when he finally jolted to a stop against a tree trunk dozens of yards down the slope, flayed and wrenched and whooping with the effort of getting air into his abused lungs, he was at least still conscious and not badly broken physically.

They were in the mountain’s shadow, and even after he had brushed the leaves and dirt and blood out of his face, it took several seconds for Crawford’s eyes to adjust to the cathedral dimness; he heard, more than watched, as the roped-together bundle of luggage rolled noisily down the slope, finally stopping with an expensive-sounding internal crash against a tree trunk. After that, all he could hear was the diminishing rattle of dislodged dirt-clods tumbling away far below.

His breathing was a confusion of hiccups and frightened sobs. He was trying hard to believe that the rushing bulk had been a boulder, and wishing passionately that he had stayed back down in the lowlands.

He was cramped in tension, his nerves uselessly braced for some crushing, malevolent impact; it didn’t come, and after several seconds he cautiously let himself relax a little.

He hitched himself up to a less painful position and looked around for Byron. After a few moments he saw him, perched on a rock above Crawford and to his left, chewing his knuckle and staring down at him.

“Aickman,” Byron said, just loudly enough for his voice to carry across the abraded slope, “it’s important that you do exactly as I say—do you understand that?”

Crawford’s stomach was suddenly icy, and his muscles had tightened up again. He managed to squeeze the word “Yes,” out of his rigid lungs.

“Don’t move—if you move, it’ll get you. You can’t slide away faster than it can jump onto you.” Byron stretched and reached under his jacket.

“Where,” said Crawford stiffly, “is … it?”

Byron had drawn his pistol, and was looking closely at the leaves and dirt around him, as if he’d dropped something. “It’s—do keep calm now—it’s right over your head. I suppose you could look, if you can do it slowly.”

Crawford felt drops of sweat run down his ribs under his shirt as he slowly forced the muscles of his neck to tilt his head up; he saw the upper slope, bristling with trees that obstructed a view of the road, and then he saw the outer branches of the tree he was braced against, and finally he gathered his tattered courage and looked straight up.

And it took all of his self-control not to recoil or scream, and he was distantly resentful that he couldn’t just die in this instant.

The thing was clinging upside down to the trunk, its projecting snout only a few feet above his face. It had no eyes, nor even eye sockets, and its corrugated gray hide and anvil-shaped face were anything but mobile, but he could tell that he had excited its profoundest attention. A mouth opened under the snout, exposing teeth like petrified plates of tree fungus, and the creature began to stretch its neck downward.

“Lower your head,” called Byron tensely.

Crawford did, trying hard not to be sudden about it and he let the motion sweep his gaze across Byron’s perch. Byron was kneeling up on the rock and aiming his pistol in Crawford’s direction, and Crawford saw that a stumpy section of tree branch was now projecting from the muzzle.

“God help us both,” Byron whispered, and then he screwed his eyes tightly shut and pulled the trigger.

The deafening bang and the spray of splinters struck Crawford simultaneously,

and he convulsed and lost his balance and slid away from the tree; and though he was able to dig his fingers and toes into the dirt and drag to a stop five yards farther down the slope, he couldn’t make himself lift his head until he heard the creature fall heavily out of the tree and then begin to crawl uphill, away from him.

The thing, he saw then, was moving slowly on all fours toward Byron, lifting its long legs high over its body with each step, as if it were crawling through deep mud, and audibly snuffing the air with its upraised, elongated face. The young lord had stood up on his rock and was waiting for it, his spent pistol gripped clubwise in a white fist, his face even paler than normal but resolute. Crawford wondered why he wasn’t scrambling back uphill, and then remembered his lameness.

People were calling now from up on the road, but Crawford was busy digging a fist-sized rock out of the slope, and he had no breath to answer them. The effort of flinging it upward made him slide another yard downhill, but he had thrown accurately—the stone thudded against the nightmarishly broad back of the creature.

He coughed out a hoarse cry of triumph—which became a grating curse when he saw that he had not even slowed the monster down.

“Save yourself, Aickman,” said Byron in a voice that was flat with control.

With despair Crawford realized that he was not going to obey. His heart was still pounding alarmingly in his ribcage, and he knew he could accomplish nothing, but he began climbing uphill after the slow, snuffling, misshapen thing.

Peripherally he noticed a silent flare of green above him and to his right, and he paused to look.

It was morning sunlight in the top branches of a pine tree; dawn was finally, belatedly, coming to this west-facing mountainside. Beyond the tree was a slanting ridge that stood higher than the rest of the slope, and on the humped spine of it dew glinted dazzlingly in the brown carpet of pine needles.

He shifted to look back at Byron and the monster, and something jabbed him painfully in the side; he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an uneven fragment of his broken shaving mirror.

And an idea came to him. The nature of sunlight changed sometime, Byron had told him four days ago when they’d been discussing the nephelim, and now it’s bad for them; and Crawford remembered, too, stories he’d heard in childhood about trolls who turned to stone at the first glint of dawn, and vampires that had to retreat into the earth to hide from the sun … and he remembered that Perseus had found a mirror useful in defeating Medusa.

He tucked the mirror fragment back into his pocket and resumed his scrambling crawl—but he was moving toward the sunlit ridge now, away from Byron and the monster.

Behind him he could hear Byron calling taunts at the indomitable thing, but Crawford didn’t look back until he had reached the ridge and climbed up the projecting tree roots onto the rounded hump of it.

He was in sunlight now, and he fumbled the broken pieces of mirror out of his pocket and held up the biggest piece—but he could no longer make out Byron or the creature in the dimness below him. In panicky haste he caught the sun in the glass and began sweeping the bright spot of reflected glare back and forth across the shadowed hillside.

He heard the earthquake-roar again at one point, and with desperate hope he jerked the spot of light back to where it had just been—and though it was what he had hoped for, he shuddered to see that terrible head turn slowly toward him, and he nearly flung the piece of mirror away. The thing in the light shook its head and resumed climbing, flexing and stretching its long legs in the air—Crawford could now see Byron, only a few yards above the advancing form—but Crawford forced his hand not to shake, and to hold the spot of light in the center of the broad back.

The thing stopped again, and again the trees shook to a roar that was like a mountain shifting on its hell-foundationed base. Now the figure turned around and began ponderously levering its bulk across the slope toward Crawford.

He almost dropped the mirror and ran. Smoke-colored slabs of tooth were bared in what was unmistakably outraged fury, and its pincers were tearing up head-sized chunks of dirt, and even splitting stones, as it advanced toward him; and he knew that physical damage was not by any means the worst thing to be feared when facing such an entity as this. But he held his ground and forced his bladder to stay tight and kept the light centered on the thing’s neck … where he could now see a torn spot, probably where Byron’s branch-missile had struck it.

The thing was getting closer, and the shifting roar of its breathing now sounded like a distant, valley-filling orchestra; was the thing singing? Crawford found himself following the theme, and the tragic grandeur of it caught at the breath in his throat; lyrics sprang spontaneously into his mind, coruscating tapestries of language as intricate as the depths of an opal, and it seemed to him that this must be some antediluvian march composed by sentient planets to celebrate a wedding of suns.

But the music was fading, as if a wind had sprung up between himself and the vast but far-distant orchestra. The long-legged thing was only a few yards away now, but it was moving much more slowly, and it seemed to Crawford that a gold and purple aura was flickering around its head; and at last with an audible crack it froze.

For several taut seconds it continued to stare eyelessly at him while he held the light on its neck.

And at last it tipped, slowly at first and then with a massive rush, and its shoulders jarred the earth several yards downslope and then it was just a tumbling statue breaking up as it receded away, more audibly than visibly, below them.

When the crashing racket had diminished to silence, Crawford could hear someone clambering down the slope above them, and soon he heard Hobhouse shouting angrily.

“Here we are, Hobby,” called Byron, his voice quavering only slightly. “And the luggage is wedged against a tree down here. Did the horses fall too?”

“Damn you for not answering before,” yelled Hobhouse, grudging relief evident in his tone. “Yes, one horse fell, but not far and he’s not hurt. What was that roaring? And what did you shoot at?”

Crawford had climbed, much more slowly and carefully now, halfway to Byron’s perch, and when he looked up he saw the young lord wink at him. “Some species of mountain lion, I believe!” A frown crossed his haggard face for a moment, and he called, “Don’t tell them about it back in England, there’s a good lad! Hey? No sense worrying poor Augusta.”

Soon Crawford had joined Byron on his rock, and from there he could see men hopping down the mountainside on a rope.

Byron held out his hand, which Crawford now noticed was torn and bloody. “Earn your keep, Doctor.”

Crawford took his hand and looked at the ragged wound. “What did you catch it on?” he asked, proud that he could speak levelly.

“Our … assailant,” Byron said. “Before you managed to get your reflector working, that thing got up here. I pushed him back, and he slid down a little, but … he got his teeth into me.” His smile was brightly bitter. “Redundant, in my case, of course … but this confirms my resolve to divest myself entirely of the connection, in the"—he swept his bloody hand in a gesture that encompassed the entirety of the Alps—"in the high places.”

Crawford looked down at the stump of his own wedding ring finger, on which the bite scar was still visible, and he tried, with at least some success, to be glad that he was going along.

Byron developed a fever as they continued up the mountain and the sun burned its slow arc across the empty vault of the sky, and when they reached snow he took delight in showing Crawford how the sweat from his forehead, falling on a snowbank, made “the same dints as in a sieve.” Several times he slipped and fell on the ice, and Hobhouse, clearly alarmed, kept throwing glances of suspicion at Crawford—who, doubtless because of the thinner air, was beginning to feel a little dizzy and disoriented himself.

Byron, though, was full of hectic cheer; at one point he gaily called Hobhouse’s attention to a shepherd playing upon a pipe in a sky-bordering meadow across the valley—"just like the ones we saw in Arcadia fifteen years ago … though, now I recollect it, they all carried muskets instead of crooks, and had their belts full of pistols"—and later, when their guide asked them to cross one mountain ledge in a hurry because of the danger of falling rocks, Byron just laughed and asked Hobhouse if he remembered the crowd of Greek workmen he had seen in 1810, who wouldn’t carry an ancient statue to Lord Elgin’s ship because they swore they’d heard the statue sobbing at the prospect of being sent across the water.

He seemed to recover himself for a little while at the peak of Mont Davant, from which vantage point they could see most of Lake Leman far below them to the west, Lake Neufchatel to the north and, ahead of them in the east, the remote, towering, patriarchal peaks of the canton of Bern.

He and Crawford had wandered away from the rest of the group, and were standing on a wind-scoured rock outcrop above the plateau of powder snow. Both men were sweating and shivering.

“You lied, I think,” remarked Byron in the echoless silence of the sky, “when you told Hobhouse that you don’t write poetry—hmm?”

Crawford, nervous about the abyss overhead, sat down and gripped the rock with damp hands. “Not precisely,” he managed to answer. “I haven’t written any—but I do find myself building … verses, images, metaphors, in my head, when I’m half asleep.”

Byron nodded. “These creatures aren’t especially good visually, but they are purely matches in a powder keg when it comes to language. I wonder how many of the world’s great writers have owed their gift to the … ultimately disastrous attentions of the nephelim.” His laughter was light and sarcastic. “And I wonder how many of them would have freed themselves, if they could have.”

Crawford was sick, and he wasn’t letting himself think about all the narrow ledges and steep climbs that lay between him and normal ground—and he was still trembling from their encounter with one of Byron’s precious nephelim that morning, and didn’t relish hearing anything even remotely good about the creatures. “I wonder if that was mistletoe,” he snapped.

Byron blinked at him. “If what was?”

“The twig you shot at that beast this morning. Isn’t that what Balder the Beautiful was killed with, in the Norse myths? A dart made of mistletoe? I guess that makes you Loki, Odin’s evil brother.”

Byron frowned, and Crawford wondered if he could actually be feeling bad about having shot at that monstrosity this morning.

“Balder,” Byron said softly. “You’re right, a wooden stake killed him. Christ! Do all of our most affecting legends, as well as our literature, derive from these devils?” He shook his head and looked down the west side of the mountain, and Crawford knew he was thinking of the hideous statue that lay shattered in the bottom of a ravine far below them.

Finally Byron looked up and met Crawford’s gaze. “Loki came to a bad end, didn’t he?” Byron said. “But I’m afraid his is the only example we can follow with any self-respect.” He shivered and started back toward the others.

When the innkeeper handed her back her passport, Julia Carmody hoped that she could now let her phantom sister lie dormant in her head until … until the day when the sister would emerge, do what she had to do, and then disappear forever.

Julia had had to be Josephine two days ago in order to pick up the bank draft from her father at the Poste Restante in Geneva, and tonight, here in Clarens, getting a room had required that she show her passport; but she didn’t want to touch the passport again until she was crossing international boundaries on the way home to Bexhill-on-Sea. And she didn’t ever want to think about the anguished note that had accompanied the bank draft.

With luck she’d be home comfortably before Christmas, and her father would accept the way things were, or had turned out to be, and then she would be Julia for the rest of her life, and she could expunge the name and identity of Josephine from her memory.

A boy carried her bags upstairs, and when he had opened the door to her room she took only the hastiest glance inside, for she knew in advance what she would see—the same disgraceful thing she had seen in every rented room she’d been in since the twenty-first of July, her wedding day—and she had her sentence of French prepared.

“Oh!” she exclaimed after her first glimpse of the bed. “Mon Dieu! Voulez-vous changer les draps!” The sheets, as she had known they would be, were grossly blotted with dried blood.

The boy, of course, pretended to see nothing wrong with the sheets, but she gave him a handful of francs to have them changed anyway. A harassed-looking chambermaid was summoned, and when she had changed the offending bedclothes and departed, Julia opened the lake-facing window and lay down on the bed.

At dusk a wind from the mountains brought rain, and the rattle of it in the drainpipes woke her up. The room was dark and the curtains were flapping against the dark sky—

—And she couldn’t remember who she was.

She was empty, a staring-eyed vacuum, and it was horrible. Dimly her body knew that there were several personalities who inhabited its head from time to time, and now it wanted one of them, any one of them, to appear; the throat buzzed with a sort of beseeching whimper … and suddenly, as if it was a gift from outside itself, the body had grateful access to language.

“Come,” it croaked. “Come in. I’m open to you. I need you.”

Personality animated the body then—she was Julia again, but she was worried about this new development. Would this recur, this blankness? And could she count on it always being the Julia personality who would step in to fill the vacancy? Would it—

“Good evening, Julia,” came a soft voice from the window side of the room.

She whirled in that direction with a gasp, and saw a bulky silhouette against the emerging stars; and she knew instantly that the Julia personality had not been the only entity that had responded to her body’s desperate invitation.

Oddly, she wasn’t frightened. “Good evening,” she said hesitantly. “Can I … light the lamp?”

The figure chuckled—from its voice she knew it was masculine. “Of course.”

She opened her tinderbox and struck the flint and steel over the lamp’s wick, and yellow light grew and filled the room. She turned around to face her visitor.

He was a big, burly man with a prominent nose, and he was dressed, astonishingly, in the most formal court habit—a purple frockcoat with gold embroidery, a jabot and cravat, white silk stockings and black pumps. Awed, she curtsied.

He bowed and crossed to her, and though he limped, and winced when he reached out for her hand, his eyes were kind when he lifted her hand to his full lips.

“I can help you,” he said, still holding her hand, “with … what you’re here for. I can lead you to the man you want to find. He was protected against you before, but his protector is in another country now.” He shook his head; the motion seemed to hurt him, and Josephine saw red lines like veins or cracks on the skin of his neck. “I wasn’t going to disobey her, and hurt him—I just wanted to look at him—but he and his friend hurt me, terribly. So I’ll help you.”

He released her hand and limped across to the bed and lay down on it. Julia looked at the hand he’d kissed, and realized that the new sheets were fated to go the way of the first set, for blood was dripping energetically from a bite on the knuckles.

Her heart was hammering in her breast, and before she went to join him she turned away to catch her breath. The lamplight had grown brighter, and had made a dark mirror of the window panes, but she had been avoiding looking at her own reflection ever since her identity had started to become fragile two months ago, so she pulled the curtains across the glass. She didn’t notice that, in the reflection, she was alone in the room except for a fragment of broken statuary on the bed.

CHAPTER 10

We talk of Ghosts; neither Lord Byron or M. G. L[ewis]

seem to believe in them; and they both agree, in the very

face of reason, that none could believe in ghosts without

also believing in God. I do not think that all the persons

who profess to discredit these visitations really discredit

them, or, if they do in the daylight, are not admonished

by the approach of loneliness and midnight to think more

respectably of the world of shadows.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley,

17 July 1816

For the next two days Byron’s touring party moved uneventfully east through the Enhault and Simmenthal valleys, and on Sunday the twenty-second of September they crossed the Lake of Thoun to Neuhause and then resumed the horses and carriage for the fourteen-mile trip east through Interlaken and south to the village of Wengen, which lay at the foot of the range that included the Kleine Scheidegg, the Wengern, and beyond them, the more than cloud tall Jungfrau.

The sky was darkening and overcast by the time they found rooms at the house of the local curate, but Byron insisted on saddling a horse and going for a closer look at the mountains while there was still any light at all, and so Hobhouse, Crawford and a guide mounted up to accompany him.

From the cobblestoned road outside the vicarage they could see a waterfall bisecting the dark wall of the mountains, seeming to be more cloud than water in the distance; the slowly swaying column stood nearly a thousand feet from its mist-hidden base to its skyey source, and Byron shuddered and said it looked like the tail of the pale horse on which death is mounted in the Apocalypse. With that observation he galloped away up the road, leaving the other three to follow.

Rain swept over them after they’d gone only a few miles, but it wasn’t until the thunder began frightening the horses that Byron would listen to Hobhouse’s demands that they turn around.

Byron was in a wild mood, and because the man was his patient Crawford rode beside him. Byron was waving his cane over his head—which alarmed Crawford, for it was a new sword cane, and Byron had refused to let the guide carry it for fear that it might draw lightning—and he was shouting verses into the rain.

Twice Crawford recognized phrases he had heard in his dreams.

Hobhouse’s cloak turned out to be anything but waterproof, and so they left him in a cottage and rode on toward the curate’s house to get a man to bring him back an umbrella and a stauncher cloak.

A flare of lightning lit the valley at the same instant that thunder cannoned against the mountains, and Byron stood up in the stirrups to brandish his cane at the sky. He looked across at Crawford and laughed to see him cringing in his saddle.

“Tomorrow we’ll climb to the peaks, never mind what the weather is,” Byron yelled over the rain. After a moment he added, “Do you believe in God, Aickman?”

Crawford shrugged miserably; his own cloak was not much better than Hobhouse’s. “I don’t know,” he called back. “Do you?”

Byron settled back onto the saddle. “I’m a speculator with option to buy,” he said. “But I can’t see how … I mean, can there be supernatural phenomena without there being, too, a God?—In the absence of any God?”

Crawford bleakly reviewed the course of his own life, especially the last two months of it. “I’m afraid,” he called finally, not at all happy with the answer he had come to, “that the more absences there are, the more things are possible. And so if there’s an absence the size of God, then there probably isn’t anything so appalling that we can count on not meeting it.”

His statement seemed to sober Byron. “It’s just as well you chose to disguise yourself as a veterinarian, Aickman,” he called through the rain. “You’d have made an alarming philosopher.” He spurred his horse and rode on, leading the way back to the curate’s house.

The figure silhouetted against the yellow light from the open door proved to be the curate himself, and when the travellers had dismounted he curtly asked to see Byron and Crawford alone in his room.

“Some problem about the fee, I expect,” muttered Byron as the two of them hung up their wet cloaks and followed the old man up the stairs; but Crawford had seen the look of distaste and sorrow on the lean, wrinkled face, and he wondered if they were all simply going to be thrown out, as he had been from the rooming house near Geneva eight days ago.

The old clergyman’s room was right up under the steeply slanted roof, with a very low wall on one side and a high one on the other, and the windows that ran at ankle height along the low side were so small that Crawford guessed a lamp was necessary here even on the sunniest day. Rows of old leather book spines along shelves on the high wall seemed to blot up the light from the old man’s lamp as he set it down on a low table and then lowered himself onto the narrow bed and waved toward two chairs at the other end of the room.

“I … did not know who you were,” said the old clergyman, speaking English with a heavy German accent, “when you came here. I would not have let you stay.” Byron had just sat down, and now pushed his chair back to stand up again, but the old man raised his hand. “You may stay now, I will not turn you out. But I have heard from the people about you—you, besonders,” he added, looking at Crawford.

“Means ‘especially,'” put in Byron helpfully. “What did they tell you about us? That old incest story again? Those girls weren’t sisters, you know—Mary Godwin had entirely different parents than the Clairmont girl, even if they do both have the same stepfather. And in any case, is it really worth the effort of your disapproval? These are things that every day occur.”

“This is nothing to do with … plain carnal congresses,” the old curate said. “Worse stories are about. The people tell me that you have dealings with … unheavenly spirits, the things which walk the valley of the shade of death.”

“A nice phrase,” said Byron, grinning. “I like it. So we’ve sinned against your … ordinances? Prove it and punish us, if you can.”

The old man shook his head wearily. “The mountains, the high places, are not the path to redemption now, not anymore. That was long ago—and dangerous even then. Salvation, redemption, are now to be found through the sacraments.” He turned to Crawford, and his lined old face was rigid, as if with the effort of concealing his loathing. “Even such as you might be able, through them, to escape damnation.”

Byron laughed uneasily. “Don’t be so hard on the lad, Father, he’s not nearly as bad as all that. My God, you’re eyeing him as if you think he’ll steal the gold chalices off your altar.”

“Or turn the wine in them to vinegar,” said Crawford, his voice quiet with anger, “just with a look. Is this Christian charity as it’s practiced in Bern?” He stood up, rapping his head against the low ceiling. “The Church has become a more … exclusive club since the founder’s day, it’s clear. No doubt the Devil is more hospitable.”

“Wait,” said the curate, “sit. I want to see you in Paradise, but I also want to see all my parishioners there. If you go to the mountains now, in the state you’re in, things will be roused that will do none of my people any good.” He nodded to Crawford. “Another like you is already in the Alps, but I can do nothing about him, and in any case he’s keeping to the low passes and travelling only at night….”

He had slowly lifted the stopper from a decanter of brandy on a shelf by the bed, and he turned toward a row of glasses beside it. “Will you stay down here, away from the mountains? I can promise you redemption, if you truly want it—and I can promise you death, if you persist in your course. You have not ever had better counsel than what I am saying.”

Crawford sat down, a little mollified, but he shook his head. “No. I’m going up there.”

Byron nodded agreement. “I don’t get dissuaded from my courses by this kind of counsel.”

The curate closed his eyes for a moment, then shrugged and poured the brandy into three of the glasses. He stood up to hand one to each of his guests, and then hobbled back to the bed and sat down.

Behind him a human shadow appeared on the wooden panelling of the wall, though there was no form casting it. The dim silhouette shook its head slowly, and then faded.

Crawford’s heart was thumping, and he looked at Byron; Byron’s eyes were wide—clearly he’d seen it too. Both of them put their glasses down on the floor.

“None for me, thanks,” said Crawford, standing up.

“Me either,” said Byron, who had already got to the door and opened it.

The old man was quietly sobbing on his bed as they drew the door closed behind them, and Crawford wondered if he was repenting having tried to poison his guests, or sorry that the attempt had failed.

On the way back to where Hobhouse waited they passed a big, six-wheeled wagon that had got bogged down in the sudden mud. Byron, still in his wild, contentious mood, insisted that they get out and push, even though the wagon seemed to have at least a dozen torch-carrying attendants who were already laboring at it, and so he and Crawford and the servant got off their horses and dug their heels into the mud and helped shove at the thing.

The attendants didn’t seem grateful for the help, especially when Byron got up into the bed of the wagon to direct the work, but they put up with it until the wagon was rolling again, then made Byron get down and whipped up the horses and resumed their southward progress.

“Coals to Newcastle,” laughed Byron as he got back onto his horse.

“How’s that?” asked Crawford wearily, wishing his boots weren’t now full of cold mud.

“The big box they’ve got in the back of that is full of ice—it leaked on my hands when I leaned against it—and they’re heading into the Alps.”

At seven o’clock the next morning they set out toward the mountains again, fortified with coffee and brandy—their own—against the eternal chill that made fragile cloud-plumes of human speech and then snatched them away into the cobalt sky. Crawford and the guide were on mules, while Byron and Hobhouse rode horses.

The waterfall was now glowing in sunlight; Byron called attention to the rainbow that hovered around it like a halo, but Hobhouse sniffed and said he wasn’t impressed with a rainbow that had only two distinct colors in it.

“At least they’re regal colors, Hobby,” said Byron, and only Crawford heard the tremor in his voice. “Purple and gold, after all.”

The mountains themselves were too big—too high and distant and vastly jagged—for Crawford to comprehend; looking at them was like looking through a telescope at the alien features of the moon. It was only the unnaturally clear air of this high country that let these sights be visible in such awful totality—back down there behind the travellers, in the zones where mankind flourished, hazes and mists and smokes mercifully limited the extents of human sight. As the hooves clopped along the uphill stone path toward the feet of the sky-spanning peaks, Crawford kept catching himself thinking of the mountains as ancient, living entities, and he was nervously reminded of the story of Semele, the human mother of Dionysus, who was struck dead by the sight of Zeus in his undisguised, inhuman glory.

The sun blazed on the expanses of snow and ice, and by midmorning they had all donned blue-tinted goggles to protect themselves from snow-blindness.

The oily scent of the pines was diminishing as the travellers got higher, like the taste of juniper in a glass of gin that’s being refilled with icy vodka, and Crawford thought that all smells, and even the ability of the air to carry them, would soon be among the things he and the others had left behind. The pines they were passing now were all withered and stripped of bark, and Byron stared at them sombrely and said that they reminded him of himself and his family.

Crawford thought the remark was a little too affected and theatrical, a little too Byronic, to be genuine, and he wondered if Byron himself could always distinguish between his own emotions and his poses.

The road grew steeper, and at one point they had to angle across the path of a recent avalanche; no trees still stood in the wide, swept-looking track of it and, blinking up the slope at the inaccessible steepnesses from which it had come, Crawford was surprised to see a broad silvery vein glittering in a freshly exposed stone face. He asked the guide about it, and the man answered, uncomfortably, that it was the argent de l’argile, or silver from clay, and that in a day or two it would have withdrawn back into the body of the mountain.

After a thoughtful pause, Crawford asked if it was a particularly lightweight metal, but the guide just turned away and began pointing out peaks ahead of them.

Soon they were moving in single file along narrow switchback ledges up the face of the Wengern, and Crawford discovered that his mule behaved as though it were carrying its usual width-tripling bales of cargo—the beast plodded along the very precipice edges of the paths to avoid snagging its nonexistent baggage against the mountain wall. No amount of yanking or swearing could make the beast move in closer to the wall and, after an hour or so of the almost tightrope-walking pace, Crawford had got used to it, and only turned pale when his mount would knock loose a section of the edge with its hoof and have to scramble to right itself.

Josephine was on foot, but her new friend had given her a splinter of stone to press deeply into the flesh of her palm, and for hours she had been able to jog along after Byron’s party without fatigue; and on the ledgy paths up the mountain she was able to keep pace with her quarry effortlessly. Her transfixed palm had stopped bleeding hours ago, and her hand only hurt when she accidentally touched the rock wall with it.

“I can’t accompany you,” her friend had told her at dawn when he had had to leave. “But take this piece of me"—he had handed her the little stone claw then—"and keep it, me, enclosed in your flesh, and I will be with you in spirit, and guide you.”

And he certainly had. Several times she had encountered a choice of ways, but each time the stone spike pulled her decisively, if painfully, one way or the other—it had always kept her on Crawford’s trail, even when her eyes were watering so badly in the glare of the sunlit snow, in spite of her goggles, that she couldn’t see where she was going; and her only concern now was not to follow so closely that someone in Byron’s party might look back along some straight traverse and see this solitary female figure following after them.

She had seen only one party of tourists—a dozen men standing around a tent that seemed to conceal a big wagon—and they seemed to have pitched camp for the day. Clearly they wouldn’t be interfering with her plans.

Her pistol was loaded and tucked into the waistband of her skirt; her friend had told her of another way to get Crawford, but the mere description of the procedure had made her sick—with a weak, horrified attempt at humor she had told him that she didn’t have eyes for it—and she was resolved to make the gun serve.

Scuff marks in the snow told her that her quarry was still ahead of her, but all at once the stone imbedded in her hand began pulling upward. Startled, she glanced up.

The face of the mountain directly above her was somewhat sloping and bumpy, but surely not enough so that she could climb it, she thought—especially with a gored hand! Her arm was stretched out above her head now, and she tried to pull it down. The stone only grated between the bones of her palm, making her nearly faint with the pain, and then it pulled upward harder.

The only way she could lessen the agony was to fit her free hand and the toes of her boots into irregularities in the rock wall and pull herself up; she did, and was permitted several seconds of relief, but the stone soon resumed its tugging, and she had to do it again.

The stone seemed to want her to get above Crawford quickly. And though she was in such pain that the world had gone dim, and terrified that she might slip and find all her weight hanging on her maimed hand, it never occurred to her to pull the guiding, torturing stone out of her palm.

By noon Byron’s party had reached a valley only a few hundred feet short of the Wengern’s summit, and they dismounted to tie up the horses and mules and proceed on foot to the top.

Crawford’s legs were uncomfortably quivery after the hours in the saddle, and he kept shaking them and stamping around to get rid of the feeling … and he noticed that the odd tingling went away when he was walking downhill. Just for the relief of it he took several long strides back down the road, and then it occurred to him that Byron had done the same thing only moments before.

He looked across at Byron, and found himself intercepting his stare. Byron walked across the slanting, snow-dusted rock surface to him, and when he was standing beside Crawford he spread his hand in a gesture that took in Hobhouse and the guides and the servants, none of whom seemed a bit impelled to walk downhill.

“They’re not sweating the way you and I are, either,” he told Crawford quietly, his breath wisping away as visibly as smoke. “It’s not an effect of riding, or scanty air. I believe that, like hydrophobia, it’s a consequence of having been

bitten.” He smiled tightly and waved up at the snowy summit. “There’s a cure up there, but the venom in us doesn’t want us to get it.”

They heard the rolling thunder of an avalanche, but there wasn’t even a mist of powder snow to be seen over the mountain when they looked up—it must have been on the south side.

Crawford wanted nothing so much as to be off this mountain—to be at sea level or, better, below sea level, living in the Dutch low countries, no, living in a deep, sunless cave … that would be best of all. Even with the blue-tinted goggles on, the sun glare on the steep snow slopes was blinding, and he kept having to push them up to wipe the stinging sweat from his eyes. “The venom,” he told Byron hoarsely, “is persuasive.”

Byron took off his coat as they walked back toward Hobhouse and the assembled servants and beasts. “Only a few hundred feet left to go,” he said. “We can be back here within the hour, and back at the curate’s house before dark.”

Josephine had heard the avalanche too, and her flinty guide seemed to take it as an excuse to let her rest for a little while on the foot-wide diagonal ledge she’d been hobbling along for the last quarter of an hour. She was a hundred yards west of Byron’s party and a bit above it, and she had missed the sunlit valley and was shivering in a wind that spun across the shadowed face of the mountain like the bow-wave cast up by a ship; but the momentary cessation of the agony in her hand made her mid-cliff crouching place seem luxurious.

For several minutes she basked in the rest, and then the bone-grating tug started up again, and with a whispered sob she straightened her knees and looked up at the nearly vertical slope that still loomed above her—and then she realized that the stone was pulling downward.

What is it, she thought wildly, suddenly terrified at the notion of climbing backward—has Crawford started down again already?

No, came a voice in her head, but we can’t go any farther up. Wait for him below—get him when he descends.

With a wave of despair colder than the wind, Josephine realized that she might not be able to survive the descent even with the spiritual strengthening she’d get from having killed Crawford … but that she certainly wouldn’t survive without it.

I can’t, she thought; I can’t make it down without having spilled his blood on the rocks and snow.

The stone spur in her hand pulled at her insistently.

It’s you, she thought at it; you can’t go any higher. Well, I can.

The effort leached the color from her face and outlined her teeth starkly against her bloodless lips, but she managed to brace herself, flex her arm until she thought her sleeve would burst, and then actually pull her hand up off the stone claw.

Blood sprayed brightly in all directions as if she’d been shot, and for a moment the redly glistening stone hung suspended in the air—and then, with a scream that she heard only in her mind, it sprang away downward in the shadow of the mountain.

Her strength was going with the blood that was now jetting out of her and steaming in spatters on the ledge. Josephine clutched her ruined hand to herself and pressed her face against the rock wall, and her sobs were as grating and patient as the natural noises of the mountain.

Then she pulled the ribbons from her hair and knotted them tightly around her wrist—and, much more slowly now that she was unassisted, she resumed creeping up the side of the mountain.

Byron had glanced sharply across the sunlit rock face at Crawford, who now nodded to let him know that he had heard the psychic scream too—though Hobhouse and the guide, on a ledge below them, didn’t seem to have sensed anything.

“A lot of people hereabouts seem to find high altitudes uncongenial,” Byron remarked tightly, shaking sweaty hair out of his face.

Crawford was aware, with a sense that was neither quite hearing nor touch, of the minds of Hobhouse and the others below; and he would have given in to the increasing reluctance and depression if he had not constantly been reminded of his dead wife Julia; it almost seemed that he sensed her mind, too, on the mountain.

At last he pulled himself up over the last rock outcrop onto the rounded summit, even though every atom of his body seemed to be screaming at him to go back down—and then suddenly he was standing up on the wind-scoured irregular plateau, and the discomfort was gone, and the breeze was invigoratingly cold in his open, sweat-drenched shirt. He was tempted to scratch a line into the rock to mark the level at which the venom could finally be left behind.

The air seemed to be vibrating, at a frequency so high that it was scarcely discernible. He felt safe for now in ignoring it.

The summit was about a quarter the size of a cricket field, looking particularly tiny under the dominating, empty sky; he took several wobbly strides across it to look at the valleys and peaks spread out vastly distant below him—and at the Jungfrau that, miles away, still towered above. It seemed to him that he felt lighter for all the immense volume of air that he was now on top of, and he thought he must be able to jump much higher here than he could on the ground.

“I don’t think people have any problem at all,” he called back to Byron.

Then Byron, who had been looking more sick with every upward yard, dragged himself up over the last lip of stone onto the roughly level expanse, and suddenly his dark eyes glittered with renewed vitality.

“You’re right,” he said, some cheer back in his voice. He stood up, shaky as a newborn colt, and took a few steps toward Crawford. “If only we could live up here, and so be sure that the people we met were in fact people!”

Crawford sniffed the cold air uncertainly. He could no longer sense the vibration in the air, but he was sure it was still there, undetectable now because of being horribly higher in pitch. “I’m not sure …” he began.

Then abruptly his initial exhilaration was gone. There was something ominous about the atmosphere on the summit, a frigid vastness that both diminished him and made him seem perishable, in fact actively decaying, in his own eyes; glancing at Byron, he guessed the young lord was feeling it too, for his momentary cheer was gone—now his mouth was pinched and his eyes were bleak.

The sky was darkening and taking on an orange tint, and though it made him dizzy to do it Crawford glanced up at the sun, wondering if the climb could have taken a lot more time than he had thought; the sun, though, was still high in the firmament, indicating that the afternoon was still fresh—but now Crawford was distracted by something else.

There were lines in the sky, faint luminous streaks spanning the heavens from the northern horizon to the Italian peaks in the south; and though it was such a weird phenomenon that he could feel the hairs at the back of his neck stirring, it was at the same time distantly familiar. He had the feeling that he had seen this effect before, unthinkably long ago … and that the effect had been more pronounced then, the lines brighter … and despite the depression that had been increasing in the last several seconds and now sat on his shoulders almost like a physical weight, he was obscurely glad, for the sake of the rest of humanity, at least—for the sake of the infants being born now—to see that the lines had faded since.

Irrationally, he was reminded of the compass-cards shaking in the shop windows by the London Docks, and his whimsical idea that they were fluttering in some magnetic wind.

He tried to trace the memory of the sight of these sky-bands—something about particles from the sun—the particles could come down to the earth’s surface when the bands were weak, and they were poisonous to the … the other sentient race on Earth, the …

He let the thought go; suddenly it seemed presumptuous for a creature as insignificant and despicable as himself to attempt cogitation.

Byron was talking, in an oddly muffled voice. Crawford’s face was buffeted by a momentary puff of wind when he looked across at him, but he noticed that Byron’s voice was not quite in synchronization with the movement of his lips.

And even through the muffling effect of the air Crawford could hear the leaden fear in Byron’s voice. “Behind you,” Byron was saying. “Do you see a person there?”

Crawford turned, ignoring another abrupt punch of wind, and his shoulders slumped in despair when he recognized the figure that stood a few yards farther up the slope.

It was Julia, his wife—but she was as translucent as tinted glass. He couldn’t tell whether the trouble he was having in getting a breath into his lungs was a consequence of the altered air or his own shock.

“It’s a ghost,” said Byron hoarsely. “It’s the ghost of my sister Augusta. God, when can she have died? I’ve gotten letters from her within the month!”

Josephine peered over a shoulder of rock at Michael Crawford and pulled the pistol out of her skirt. She had pushed her goggles up onto her forehead when the light began to dim and redden, and now she could see perfectly—though breathing was getting difficult.

She had lived in the shadow of self-loathing all her life, and so the summit’s psychic field made no changes in her.

And the climb had actually become easier shortly after she had got rid of her flinty guide—toward the end she had seemed almost able to swim up the side of the mountain—and she now had the strength, even with her ruined left hand, to cock the gun. She raised it and aimed it at the center of Crawford’s torso.

He and Byron were standing slightly below her and no more than eight yards away—it was an easy shot, but she braced the gun barrel on a rock to make it certain. Finally she sighed and pulled the trigger.

Through the blinding flare of the detonation she saw her target spin away—but then she noticed the figure standing farther up the slope, and she recognized it as Crawford. Had she shot the wrong person?

But the person up the slope, she now saw, wasn’t solid—the light was glowing right through its substance. Why, she thought with relief, that isn’t Crawford; that’s just his ghost.

Crawford heard the bang, and turned—and then he sprang away to the side, for he had seen a shiny ball rushing through the air toward him as fast as an angry bee.

And all at once he felt as if he had jumped into an invisible haystack. He heard the pistol ball buzz past him, and felt the shock wave of its passage ripple across his body like a caress, but he was too stunned to do anything more than stare down at his feet, which were suspended a yard above the rock surface. He was floating, supported only by the gelatinous air.

It took several long seconds for him to settle to the ground; and only when he had landed did it occur to him to look back in the direction the bullet had come from.

By the reddening light he saw a figure standing behind a bulge of rock eight yards away. Crawford couldn’t guess who it might be, but he assumed the person would have as much trouble moving as he was having, and that he would be safe in ignoring him or her for a little while.

And if the person had another pistol, and shot at him more successfully in the meantime, wouldn’t that actually be a good thing?

He turned back to Julia. She was walking down the slope toward him and Byron, and somehow she was able to walk in this thickened air … though it seemed to Crawford that she was getting more transparent. He wondered if his nausea and light-headedness were indications of near panic.

Byron might not have heard the shot. “I don’t need to know how she died,” he said now in a choking voice. “I killed her. I seduced her, God damn me! That’s what I tried to tell you, that day I picked you up in my carriage. Incest—it wasn’t her fault, she was never strong-willed, and she did resist me at first. And then I left her alone in England with our child … and my horrible ex-wife.”

Byron frowned and clenched his jaw, and Crawford knew he was resisting the despair the mountain’s psychic field was inducing. “My ex-wife drove Augusta to this, I’m certain—I won’t take every bit of blame here, God damn it!—Augusta was so like me, and that harridan I married didn’t have me around to torment any longer.”

The phantom was only a few yards away now, and it was definitely Julia. She was looking directly at Crawford, and her face suddenly curdled into an expression of almost imbecilic hatred. He flinched back and raised his hand, his sleeve rippling so rapidly that it was momentarily a smoky blur; he would have dived back the way they’d come and scrambled or tumbled back down to the valley where Hobhouse and the servants waited, but Byron caught his arm.

The phantom was fading away to complete transparency even as he watched … even as the light got redder and the air got thicker. It now required real muscular effort to breathe. And then she was gone.

But she had only made way for something else—the thick air was humming with the imminence of something else. Crawford tried to scramble back to the place where they’d come up to the summit, but the air was too thick now to push through—it seemed to squeeze his ribs, compressed by the bulk of some approaching thing.

Something was forming, but not on this mountaintop—something immensely bigger and farther away, looming down and across the miles—from the peak of the Jungfrau.

It was made of arcs of darkness that gathered out of the dimming sky, and though it never did attain anything much like form, something in his blood or his spine or the oldest lobe of his brain recognized it as feminine and leonine, and as it leaned down over the three people on the Wengern summit, eclipsing the whole sky, its malevolence was as palpable as the cold.

Tears sprang from Crawford’s eyes and hung in the air like gelatinous gnats.

The thing in the sky spoke, shivering the crystal air with a voice like rock strata shifting. “Answer my riddle or die,” it said. After a long pause it spoke again. ‘What is it that walked with four limbs when the sunlight had not yet changed, and now is supported by two, but will, when the sunlight is changed again and the light is gone, be supported by three?”

Crawford exhaled, and the spent breath was a bulk in front of him, pushing his head back against the resisting air.

“Four, two and three,” Byron managed to say. “It’s … the riddle … of the … sphinx.” Even in this dimming red light Crawford could see that Byron’s face was hollowed and pale. “We’re facing … the sphinx.”

Crawford forced himself to look up at the thing. She seemed to be a lens, warping the magnetic lines into her shape; she was less substantial now than she had been in the days when she had caused the seven great gates of Thebes to be closed in fear of her, and been portrayed in towering stone on the plain of Gizeh, but she had clearly lost none of her power, at least in these high regions.

Crawford fought the induced self-loathing and made himself remember the legend; Oedipus had been confronted by the sphinx, and she had asked him what creature walked on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening. According to the story, the answer had been “man,” who crawls in infancy, walks on two legs in maturity, and walks with a stick in old age. He opened his mouth to force the word into the air, but then he hesitated.

Why was the thing asking? And had Greek mythology preserved the answer correctly? Why would the sphinx want him to say man? And, as a matter of fact, man didn’t seem to be the correct answer to this version of the riddle—there was nothing about infancy that he could think of that corresponded to “when the sunlight had not yet changed.” Whenever that might have been, he didn’t think humans would even have been around.

Who had been? The nephelim? And was the sphinx one of that species? Was he supposed to say you, instead of, in effect, me?

He remembered the flash of primordial memory he’d had when he first saw the streaks in the sky—something about the other sentient race on Earth. Could this riddle be the equivalent of a diplomatic demand of recognition, in which case the answer would be “Both of us"?

Byron opened his mouth to answer it himself, but Crawford waved at him urgently, forcing his hand through the thick air, and Byron noticed and remained silent.

“Remember the … consequences … of a wrong guess,” Crawford told him. “And I don’t think … mythology recorded … the right answer.”

The thing was leaning down closer to them, and Crawford was looking up into the darkness of her gigantic eyes. They were as inorganic as frost crystals, and it was wildly disorienting to recognize intelligence—albeit a profoundly alien intelligence—behind them.

He saw that her mouth was opening, and then the whole summit of the mountain seemed to tilt toward that vast, black maw.

He went with his last guess. “Sentient life on Earth,” he called, forcing the words out.

Something changed then.

The menacing shape still loomed above them, but after a moment Crawford realized that the sphinx was gone—what had been the arch of her wings was now a pattern of cloud on one side and the shadowed flank of the Jungfrau on the other, and the face, which had given such a strong impression of femininity, was just a pattern of stars in the dark sky. The sphinx had receded back to the remoteness of the Jungfrau’s peak.

And the air was finally beginning to loosen—apparently he had given the right answer.

Josephine saw that her shot had somehow missed Crawford—had he actually leaped out of the way?—and she slumped limply, releasing the pistol. Several seconds later her knees and the pistol bumped against the snow-dusted stone.

She remembered the procedure her night-visiting friend had told her about, the alternative to shooting Crawford; she had been confident that the pistol would make it unnecessary, and in any case she wasn’t sure how well it would work in this strange, red-lit, slowed-down world—clearly her guide had never intended for her to be here—but she now had nothing else.

At least she had no self-regard to impede her.

Though her voice clogged with tears, she managed to begin pronouncing the syllables he had taught her, and the air boiled away from in front of her as if the words were a violation of the very space here—again it occurred to her that she was not using this procedure as her friend had intended.

And, as she was speaking, she pulled the goggles off her head and swung them as hard as she could against the stone. One lens broke, and she caught one of the slow-flying fragments of tinted glass, wrestled it to a stop, and then hesitantly forced it up through the air to her face.

It took every bit of her courage and resolve to do it, but her recitation of the litany didn’t even falter when she punctured her own left eye with the piece of glass.

Crawford turned now toward the person who had shot at him—and his heart sank, for he recognized her, and he wondered if he might one day have to kill her. Then he noticed the dark streak down one side of her face, and he realized that she was bleeding.

Good, he thought exhaustedly. I hope the gun blew up in her hand, I hope she’s dying.

She seemed to be pulling something out of her eye. Whatever it was, she now pressed it against the stone, and he heard her sob: “There, damn you—render yourselves visible to such as this.”

Big drops were forming on the stone now, and bulging up, as if the summit were a wet ceiling viewed upside down. Angularities began to form inside the bulges, and then Crawford was able to make out orbs with hollows like eye sockets in them.

Byron tried to walk through the slowed air, then cursed and simply began swimming; it was an awkward way to travel, and at first he propelled himself backward as often as forward, but after a few moments he had frog-kicked over to where Crawford stood.

“Who is that?” Byron demanded, treading air beside Crawford’s shoulder. “And what the hell are those things growing up around her?”

The bulges were breaking open, releasing waving stick-arms and grimacing heads that glistened nastily in the red light … but they were all grown together, so that they formed a hideous centipede-like monstrosity instead of separate figures, and half of them seemed to be partially imbedded in the rock.

“Who cares?” said Crawford, lifting his legs and spreading his arms so that he could swim too. “Let’s get back down.” He began struggling through the air toward the route they had climbed up.

After a few hard-won yards he looked back at Byron. “This slowed-time effect probably ends at the brink—don’t go sailing over the edge.”

“Him,” yelled Josephine, beyond Byron. “You’re supposed to go after him!”

Crawford focussed on her. She was trying to run through the resistant air, but she wound up simply flailing in place, several inches off the ground, and then the melted-together things had seized her and seemed to be clumsily trying to force her down against the stone—to make her into one of themselves? Were they the decrepit ghosts of people who had died up here?

May they enjoy her company, he thought grimly, turning away.

Then, horribly, the things began to speak, and he had to turn back again. “Thought you could abandon your mother, did you, slut?” chittered one of the peeled-looking heads, its voice disorientingly out of synchronization with the motions of its mouth, as several birdy hands fumbled at Josephine’s face. “After killing me! What mother wouldn’t hate a daughter who killed her even as she was trying to give the daughter life?”

“I had to marry that horrible little nonentity,” squealed another head, “it was the only way I could get away from you! And then he killed me in that inn! Thus your fault–you killed your own sister!”

Several hinged limbs had wetly wrapped around her ankles, and a nearby head added its yapping voice to the babble. “I was always hidden away in your head so that you could be Julia, or a machine, and I’ve rotted in there! You starved me, your own self, and I hate you for it!”

Josephine fell to her knees under the ungainly assault, and she rocked her head back and wailed hopelessly into the barred red sky … and just for a moment she reminded Crawford of—of whom, not Julia—of his brother, who had been pulled under the waves in the savage surf off Rame Head.

With a convulsive jackknife motion that tore his shirt against the unyielding air and punched the breath out of him, Crawford turned around and began dragging himself back through the air toward her.

CHAPTER 11

In the wind there is a voice

Shall forbid thee to rejoice;

And to thee shall Night deny

All the quiet of her sky;

And the day shall have a sun,

Which shall make thee wish it done.

—Lord Byron, Manfred

The headwind deafened him and peeled his lips back from his teeth at every forward thrust—he was glad of the goggles over his eyes—but between strokes the air was as still as stagnant water, and over his own tortured breathing he could hear a couple of the heads begin to pay attention to him. “Drinking in a pub while I was screwing another man, and drinking there still while I burned to death!” one head called to him.

Another opened its mouth just as he clawed his way forward into the wind again, and he wondered who it would claim to be. His brother? Julia again, but tailored for his despair this time?

When the wind of his forward motion abruptly stopped, he stretched his arm out ahead and managed to grab Josephine’s wrist; then he spread his legs wide to help moor himself to the air, and pulled until his lungs felt as if wires were being twisted in them, but nothing happened.

Various ghostly limbs had grown together into a sort of ectoplasmic rope below him, and a head sprouting from a thigh was winking furiously at him. “You still owe me my death,” the thing hissed. “I got your passport, and you promised!”

Crawford pulled again, and though the effort wrenched a sob out of him he heard several ghost-limbs snap. “Kick!” he gasped to Josephine.

Josephine looked up at him, and he saw a glint of recognition in her one good eye; and then she began kicking wildly at the jabbering heads, sending jawbones and fingers slowly arching away through the red light. She kept kicking the things even after she was free, and Crawford had to yank at her arm again several times to get her attention.

“Come on, goddamn you,” he told her. “Swim!”

But her goggles were gone, leaving her completely blind except when holding still, so he had to drag her through the air. They were losing their buoyancy, and several times Crawford had to kick off from the ground as they floundered over to where Byron stood. Her empty eye socket left a trail of little globes of blood in their wake, all of them settling toward the ground as quickly as drops of vinegar through oil.

The air was loosening, and the sky was brightening back through orange toward the remembered blue, and when Crawford saw the translucent figure of Julia forming again, ahead of them, it occurred to him that he should have expected this. This phantom and the sphinx evidently each existed at specific intensities of the time-slowing they’d been experiencing—each of the apparitions only became visible or invisible as a viewer approached or receded from its characteristic point on the time spectrum.

It’s like looking through a telescope, he thought—nearby things blur out to invisibility as you focus farther away, then reappear when the scale gets back closer to normal. And this phantom lives only a few degrees outside of normal focus … unlike the sphinx, which was only barely visible even when time had slowed so extremely that the light was deep red and I could hardly drag air into my lungs.

The phantom’s eyes were bitter with hatred. It stood between them and the way down from the summit—they would have to step through it to climb down.

The self-loathing that he had been trying to hold at arm’s length increased in weight, but he knew it was being induced in him, and he tried to fight it.

“Augusta’s ghost,” said Byron, faltering and settling to the stone surface.

“No it’s not,” said Crawford wearily. His lungs were exhausted with the work of breathing, and felt ready to stop altogether. “I’m seeing it as … my dead wife, and God knows who our … lunatic friend here is seeing. Those weren’t real ghosts back there, either—the one pretending to be my wife said that I’d killed her, which"—he turned to speak directly into Josephine’s blood-streaked face—"my wife’s genuine ghost would know was not true.”

Byron looked back at him, desperately hopeful. “Really? Then might Augusta still be alive? If this isn’t—”

Crawford nodded, and reluctantly inhaled. “This thing, and those wormy phantoms that almost got this damned girl, are simply reflecting us, our … guilts and fears. And magnifying them, horribly. The sphinx’s castle is …” He paused, groping for a phrase. “… is guarded by distorting mirrors.”

Byron seemed to be almost convinced—and then the phantom woman spoke.

“I’m glad to be dead and rid of you at last,” said the thing that seemed to Crawford to be Julia. “You only diminished me, just cut me down like a tapestry you could trim into a momentarily pleasing garment, and then discard. You never knew me. You’ve never known anyone. You’ve always been alone.” And then her face changed, and Crawford saw his own features smiling coldly out of the insubstantial face. “This is the only one you were ever concerned about.”

Then abruptly it was Julia again, but Julia as he had seen her last, bloody and shapeless and jagged with broken bones, somehow still standing upright and staring at him with her ruptured and protruding eyes.

“Was this enough?” asked the horribly extended mouth. “Or do you require even more, from the people you tell yourself you love?” Behind the figure Crawford sensed waves crashing on rocks, and flames roaring out from under eaves.

Byron was apparently being shown something similar, for his face had gone ashen. “If this is even possible,” he whispered, perhaps to Crawford, “there can be no God—and no punishments but those we choose to take.” He waded through the thinning air away from the figure, away from the safe way down, to a lip of stone over a sheer drop.

He turned an unreadable look on Crawford. “It’s not so difficult to die,” he said, and then leaped out into space.

The next thing Crawford realized was that he was swimming after Byron, and he knew vaguely that he was giving in to the mountain’s psychically goading field, but also that he was fleeing from overwhelming exhaustion and horror and failure. He had reached the close limits of his self-regard, and now unquestioningly accepted what the phantom had said.

If I’m the only one I love, he thought dimly, then I’ll require it of myself, too—and when my body is a smashed, sun-dried framework of leather and bones wedged in the bottom of some Alpine ravine, I’ll be free of Michael Crawford, and everyone … and maybe, too, I’ll have paid off at least the bulk of my debts to my brother and wives.

He gave a wordless shout of renunciation and then leaped right after Byron.

The suicide impulse disappeared the moment he was in the air.

Through fear-squinted eyes he saw the whole Lutschen Valley spread out below him in the orange light, the rugged peak of Kleine Scheidegg to his right, and the Schilthorn far away ahead across the valley, and Byron’s back mercifully blocking the view of the sea of cloud directly below; he was falling perceptibly … but then someone had grabbed him from behind and was swimming back up against the weakening air.

Instinctively he reached out below him and grabbed Byron’s collar with one hand and began flailing at the air with the other; then Byron was swimming back upward himself, and Crawford was more being pulled than pulling.

Looking up, he saw a figure in a dress silhouetted against the sky, and he realized that it was Josephine who had grabbed him and hauled him back. She was swimming strongly upward with her legs and her free hand, but the air was thinning fast; all their struggling was only holding them in place, and the light was brightening to yellow.

“Never make it back up,” Crawford panted to his companions above him. “Slant in toward the slope—at least be against stone when gravity comes back full on.”

The other two nodded, and then they had all let go of each other and were swimming furiously toward a snow-piled stone shoulder slightly below them and to their left.

“Aim high!” Byron yelled.

They were still a good four yards out away from the ledge when the sky turned blue and they were suddenly flying through unresisting air … but the force of their previous swimming had left them with some forward momentum, and so instead of plummeting straight down, they tumbled forward in a parabola that slammed them onto the ledge they’d been aiming at.

Crawford’s head collided sickeningly hard with the rock wall, but through the shimmer of near unconsciousness he saw Josephine sliding toward the edge, and he managed to grab her wet hair—he couldn’t nearly have held on to her full weight, but he did halt her slide for a moment, and she got her legs under herself and was able to scramble back up onto the rough surface.

Byron was sitting up at Crawford’s left, massaging his knee and grimacing. “You can see I was ready to meet my maker,” he said. “I landed on my knees.” But in spite of his jocular tone, his face was as pale as dirty snow, and he didn’t look squarely at either of the others.

Crawford peered nervously over the edge, wincing to see the vast volumes of empty air and cloud that the three of them had nearly fallen through, and then he looked at Josephine.

She looked horrible in the bright, restored sunlight—her left eye was just a gory hole, and blood was streaked all over her face and matted in her hair, and her hand seemed to have been shot through. He wondered if she could survive.

“Thank you,” he told her hoarsely. “You saved … him and me both.”

Her right eye was wide and staring at him, and she looked like a wild animal broken but alive in a trap—he leaned away from her and gripped the rock more tightly, wondering if he would be able to kick her off into the abyss if she were to attack him—but then something seemed to click inside her head, and she bared her blood-flecked teeth in what might, under dramatically different circumstances, have been a warm smile.

“Michael!” she said. “You rogue, I’ve been looking for you all over Europe! And here I find you on top of an Alp, for Heaven’s sake!” The eye swivelled past him toward Byron. “Hello, I’m Mr. Crawford’s wife, Julia.”

Byron shook his head weakly. “Pleased to meet you,” he said in a barely audible whisper. “Who’s Mr. Crawford?”

“That’s me, my real name,” said Crawford. He got his feet under him, though it chilled his belly to do it and, crouching and gripping the wall, he looked left and right along their ledge. “We’ve got to get down off this mountain—her eye needs medical attention right away … and you and I aren’t at our best, either.”

At the right limit of their ledge the rock wall wasn’t impossibly steep, and seemed bumpy enough to provide hand and foot holds, but he had no idea where climbing it would lead them, and in any case he was pretty sure none of them had enough strength left for a real climb. To the left the ledge became narrower and more outwardly slanted, though it did seem to continue around the mountain for some distance. Neither way looked attractive.

“Let’s try yelling,” he said. “Maybe Hobhouse can get a rope down to us.”

Crawford and Byron took turns shouting, and after only a few minutes their shouts were answered from above; soon a rope came hitching and snaking down the slope from above, finally coming to a stop when its end had passed them, and though it hung a few yards to the right of the ledge, climbing across to it looked like it wouldn’t be difficult. And then hanging on, Crawford thought, won’t be any problem at all—they’ll have to break my fingers off of it.

He turned to Byron, who had been watching over his shoulder. “The girl first, I think. We can tie it around her. I don’t know how she’s stayed conscious this long, and there’s certainly—” He stopped, for he had looked past Byron, and Josephine was gone. “My God, did she fall?”

Byron’s head whipped around to the left. “No,” he said, after a moment. “Look, there’s blood and scuff marks way out along that end. She’s gone that way.”

“Josephine!” Crawford yelled. Then, after a fearful glance toward the summit, “Julia!” There was no answer.

Byron joined in, and they called several more times, with no results except to alarm Hobhouse, who kept shouting down advice about breathing deeply and avoiding looking down.

Finally they abandoned the effort and let themselves be roped up to where the others waited. Hobhouse was pompous with worry, and insisted on knowing what the hell had happened, and Byron rolled together a snowball and threw it at him as a prelude to explaining.

Byron told them only that Aickman’s wife had fallen from the summit with them and was injured and alone on a ledge somewhere below, but the guide didn’t even believe that. He insisted that on the high mountains it was a common thing for tourists—or even seasoned mountaineers—to imagine that they saw people who weren’t really there, frequently people from their pasts; and that often the sufferers of this delusion sat down and waited interminably for the imaginary others to catch up.

In support of his opinion he pointed out how visibly distraught Byron and Crawford both were, and noted the bad knock Crawford’s head had taken and, most telling of all, he observed that only a few minutes had passed between the time Byron and Crawford had disappeared onto the summit and when the party had heard the two of them calling from the ledge below. This one-eyed wife would have had to appear the moment Byron and Crawford had climbed out of sight of the others—just in time to slide with them down to the ledge they’d been roped up from—and then disappear instantly afterward.

And by the time the touring party had descended the mountain without having seen any sign of Josephine or her passage, even Crawford was willing to admit that the guide might be correct. After all, he told himself at one point as he looked back at the peak, you have been feverish lately, and lots of people have been to the top of the Wengern without having encountered thickened air and slowed time, or suicide promptings, or phantoms, or the sphinx.

Byron had retracted the story entirely, and asked Hobhouse and his servants to forget about it—and when his horse and Crawford’s mule both sank up to their shins in the clayey mud of a morass which everyone else had passed over safely, he only laughed. “Don’t try,” he called across to Crawford as they both were floundering in the mud, and the servants were tugging on the reins, “to tell me that the mountain doesn’t want us to leave.”

Crawford kicked his legs to keep from sinking farther into the chilly, clinging mud, and he tremblingly shrugged. “When I’m sure of anything,” he answered, “I’ll let you know.”

The sun was low when Josephine clambered up onto the path and started back toward the village of Wengen.

She was hardly anyone now.

When she had walked all the way back down to where the road widened out and the trees were crowded and aromatic in the darkness on either side, she began to hear faint songs on the branch-combed air, and she knew that things were awakening with the passing of the day.

She was dimly aware that her night-visiting friend had lost his power over her and would need a new invitation to have access to her again.

She wondered if he would get one and, if he did, who would extend it.

She had tied a cloth around her empty eye socket, and her hand was only seeping blood now—they might very well become mortified, but her injuries didn’t seem likely to kill her tonight.

For the moment free of all the hatreds and fears and constrictions that had defined her personalities, she actually sniffed the pine and snow-scented air with enjoyment, and her bloodstained cheeks kinked into a battered version of the small smile of a contented, sleeping child.

Byron’s party continued eastward the next day, crossing the Kleine Scheidegg Mountain and moving on through the green valley between the Schwarzhorn and the Wetterhorn to the Reichenbach Fall, where they halted to rest the horses and mules, and then looping back west to the town of Brienz on the north shore of Lake Brienz.

They stayed at an inn, and though there was fiddling and singing and waltzing downstairs, Byron and Crawford retired early to their rooms. Crawford recognized in them both the signs of recovery from long fever. Crawford didn’t dream at all.

Everybody slept later than usual, but by nine the next morning Hobhouse and Byron and Crawford and a couple of servants were aboard a boat crossing the lake of Brienz, while the horses were being brought around along the north shore. The boat Byron had hired was rowed entirely by women, which struck Byron as so novel that he insisted on taking an oar himself next to the prettiest of the rowers, up in the front.

Crawford was perched in the bow of the long, narrow boat, watching the patterns of early autumn leaves on the flat water sweep past on either side; from time to time he looked up, but always to starboard, where the slate roofs of the village of Oberried serrated the north shore and, far more distantly, the white peaks of the Hohgant and the Gemmenalp dented the blue sky. He avoided looking out over the portside, for the view in that direction was dominated by the towering, broad-shouldered bulk of the Jungfrau, and the glitter of the sun on its snows was uncomfortably like the glitter of watchful eyes.

The summer was gone, along with a lot else—but since climbing the Wengern it all seemed to have taken place in someone else’s life, someone Crawford had known and felt sorry for a long time ago. He was reminded of Shelley’s story about having cut his encysted sister out of his side, and he felt as though he had now done something similar.

Maybe, he thought with a smile, Josephine only pulled part of me back up from that abyss I jumped into—maybe some part of Michael Crawford did go plummeting away into those cloudy canyons.

The lake current was taking the boat in close to the north shore, almost into the shade of the overhanging pine branches, and when the little vessel rounded the point of a low, wooded promontory, Crawford saw several men on the shore running away from a large boulder that sat in the shallows. Smoke seemed to hover behind it.

One of the men glanced at the boat, and then flailed to a stop. “Frauen!” he yelled to his companions, “im boot!”

“Women in the boat, they say,” remarked Hobhouse, who was lounging on a thwart at the stern end.

Byron lifted his oar out of the water and squinted at them. “Of course there are women in the boat,” he said. “Did he think we’d be rowing it ourselves?”

Crawford pointed at Byron’s oar. “Well, you are, after all.” He looked ahead again. The boat was bearing down on the boulder, and smoke was definitely curling up from behind it.

The men on the shore were yelling urgently to the people in the boat.

Crawford didn’t understand what they’d said, but Byron and the boat-women evidently had—they all began working the oars furiously to put distance between the boat and the shore; and they had managed to slant sharply out away from it when the boulder abruptly became a cloud of flying stone fragments, and a resounding crack punched a wall of air and hard spray against the boat and its passengers; splinters flew as rock bits clipped the rails, and when Crawford had cuffed the spray out of his eyes he saw a cloud of smoke unfolding above a patch of choppy, foamy water where the boulder had sat. He turned to the portside and saw rings appearing farther and farther out on the lake as rock pieces went skipping away across the flat water. In the distance the Jungfrau looked on impassively.

Byron and Hobhouse were on their feet, and they both shouted furious curses until the men on the shore had run away into the woods.

“Damn me!” Byron said, sitting down and pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket. “No one’s hurt? Pure luck—those idiots could have killed us.”

The women were talking excitedly among themselves, but they seemed to have recovered from the shock, and soon resumed their rowing.

“I think it was bad luck that they saw you rowing,” said Crawford. “It made them think we were by ourselves, unaccompanied by any innocent locals.”

Hobhouse groaned. “You really should be writing novels, Aickman! Why do all of Byron’s physicians feel called on to indulge so in—in morbid fancies? Those men were just careless louts trying to get an obstruction off their beach without going to the trouble of hauling it away! Look, if they had wanted to murder us, why didn’t they simply shoot us? Or, if they had their hearts set on actually blowing us up, why not simply pitch a bomb at us? Why go to the trouble of dragging a big damned rock down to the water and blowing it up when we’re nearby?”

“Maybe because it was a rock,” said Crawford. “That is to say, because it was a rock. Things that can protect you, that can … oh, say, raise a shadow to prevent you from drinking poisoned brandy,” he went on, glancing at Byron, “might not have the power to block or deflect pieces of one of the sentient stones, one of the living ones. Maybe they can’t interfere with family. Is this making sense?”

“Oh, yes, excellent sense,” said Hobhouse nervously. “Do take my hat, old fellow. And maybe a nap would be a good idea—after all, yesterday was a strenuous—”

“Hush a moment, Hobby.” Byron leaned forward. “Go on, Aickman. Let’s say that is the only way they could have killed someone with such protections. Why would they want to do it? If someone wanted to stop us from going to the mountain, that’s one thing; but why try to kill any of us now? We would pose no further threat to them. We have no more connection with these things.”

Crawford reluctantly let his gaze go back to the Jungfrau. “Maybe that’s not altogether true,” he said softly.

Byron shook his head and picked up his oar. “I don’t believe it—and I won’t believe it, watch me. I don’t mean to seem to speak ex cathedra, but I think you have to concede that, in these matters, I have a good deal more—”

Crawford was scared, and it made him irritable. “More like ex catheter, actually.”

Byron barked one hard syllable of laughter, but his eyes were bright with resentment. “Hobhouse is right,” he said. “I have unfortunate taste in doctors.” He resumed his seat beside the prettiest rower, and began animatedly talking to her in German.

Hobhouse gave Crawford an amused look that was not without sympathy. “I think you’ve lost a position,” he said.

Crawford sat down and reached over the gunwale to trail the fingers of his four-fingered hand in the cold water. “I hope I’ve lost a lot more than that,” he said.

The sunlight had begun to slant in through the window from the west, and Mary Godwin put down her pen, stretched back in her chair and looked out the window at the housefronts and gardens and fence-walking cats along Abbey Churchyard Lane.

Their unconventional household—herself, Shelley, their nearly eleven-month-old son William, and the ever more obviously pregnant Claire—had been back in England for just a little more than three months; and often, especially at times like this when she had spent a few hours rewriting her novel, she was startled to look up and see the low Welsh mountains on the horizon beyond the Bristol Channel instead of the snowy majesties of the Alps.

Shelley had seemed nervous during the crossing from Le Havre to London, though it had been an uneventful trip—the only annoyance had been when the London customs officer had leafed through every page of the manuscript of Lord Byron’s third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, evidently supposing that Shelley was trying to smuggle lace into the country between the sheets of paper. Shelley had been entrusted with delivering the manuscript to Byron’s publisher, and he didn’t want anything to happen to it.

She waved a page of her own manuscript in the air now to dry the ink. She was apparently the only one to have taken up the challenge Byron had tossed out on that rainy evening almost exactly six months ago, when she and Claire and Polidori and Shelley and Byron had been sitting in the big upstairs room at the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Leman, after Shelley had had that nervous seizure and run out of the room.

“I really think we should each write a ghost story,” Byron had said when Shelley had returned and the awkward moment had passed. “Let’s see if we can’t do something with this mud-person who’s been following poor Shelley about.”

She’d had a nightmare shortly afterward—a figure had seemed to be standing over her bed, and at first she had thought it was Shelley, for it had resembled him closely; but it had not been him, and when she had reared up in horror it had disappeared.

She had used the vision as the basis of a novel; it was the story of a student of natural science who assembled a man out of lifeless parts, and who then managed by scientific means to endow the thing with unnatural life.

Shelley had been very interested in the tale; he encouraged her to write it out, and to freely use incidents from his own life to amplify it. She’d taken him at his word, and the story had become almost a biography of Shelley, and a chronicling of his fear of being pursued by some kind of double of himself, a sort of dreaded twin that was destined to kill everyone he loved.

Shelley had even suggested the name of the protagonist, a German word meaning something like the stone whose travel-toll is paid in advance. She had wanted to use a more English-sounding name, but it had seemed important to Shelley, and so she had obediently called the protagonist Frankenstein.

The story took place in the Swiss locales Mary and he had lived in, and the name of the protagonist’s infant brother, slain by the monster, was William,

the same as the son Mary had had by Shelley; the areas of science involved in the monster’s vivification were ones Shelley was familiar with, and the books the monster read were those Shelley had been reading at the time.

And, based on Shelley’s description of the intruder he’d wounded in his house in Scotland in 1813, she wrote a scene in which the monster’s face is seen leering through the window of an inn at its creator, who later tries unsuccessfully to shoot it; though here Shelley had showed some hesitation, and made her omit certain details. The physical description of the monster couldn’t actually be that of the thing Shelley had shot in his parlor on that occasion—Mary remembered the drawing of it that he’d done from memory, that night in Switzerland, and how much it had upset Claire and Polidori—and for some reason she couldn’t mention the fact that Shelley had pulled a muscle in his side, at the scar under his ribs, during the encounter.

She hoped the book would be published, but it seemed already to have fulfilled its main purpose, which was to draw out and dispel Shelley’s outlandish fears. He was much calmer now that he was back in England and she’d written the story out—it almost seemed that she had taken the fears one by one from Shelley’s head and transferred them to the novel.

And Shelley seemed comfortable without them—"Maybe she did stay over there with Aickman,” he had said recently while half asleep, and Mary got the clear impression that the “she” he’d referred to was the thing that he feared.

Mary hoped that the worst of their problems were now behind them, and that they’d soon be buying a house to raise children in.

She heard Shelley put a book down in the next room, and then she heard him yawn. “Mary,” he called, “where’s that letter from Hookham?”

Mary frowned slightly as she put the sheet of paper down and stood up, for while Hookham was Shelley’s publisher, this letter was probably in answer to the inquiry Shelley had made a month ago about the situation of Harriet, Shelley’s wife. Mary was determined to get Shelley to divorce Harriet and marry her, and she hoped the woman wouldn’t have got herself or the two children into some situation Shelley would feel called on to help out with.

“It’s on the mantel, Percy,” she said cautiously. Soon she heard paper tear, and wondered if she should go into the sitting room and wait expectantly while he read it, but then she decided that she shouldn’t seem to care.

She hoped that the news, whatever it might be, wouldn’t drag Shelley back to London—the city never seemed to have a good influence on him. Only yesterday he had returned from a visit to the London suburb cottage of one Leigh Hunt, a mildly revolutionary poet and editor, and the visit had apparently almost caused Shelley to suffer a relapse back into his fear of supernatural enemies—for he had met there, he said, a young poet who was “clearly marked by the attentions of the same breed of antediluvian devils” who had supposedly harried Shelley back and forth across the map.

“You can see it in his face,” Shelley had told her, “and even more clearly in his verse. And it’s too bad, for he’s as modest and affable a fellow as I’ve ever met, and he celebrated his twenty-first birthday only a month and a half ago. He has none of the pose and morbidness that neff—that this crowd usually affects. I advised him to postpone publishing his verse; I think the advice offended him, but every year that he can avoid drawing the attention of … certain segments of society … will be a blessing.”

Mary tried now to remember what the name of the young poet had been. She remembered that Hunt had nicknamed him, to Shelley’s considerable disgust, “Junkets.”

John Keats, that’s what the name was.

She heard Shelley shout in the next room, and ran in to see him sprawled across the couch, the letter clutched in his hand.

“What is it, Percy?” she asked quickly.

“Harriet’s dead,” he whispered.

“Dead?” Out of love for him, Mary made a determined effort to share his grief. “Was she sick? How are the children?”

“She wasn’t sick,” said Shelley, his lips pulled back from his teeth. He stood up and crossed to the mantel and picked up a piece of smoked glass that had been sitting there since they’d gone out to view a recent solar eclipse. “She was killed—as her murderess promised me she would be … that was four years ago, almost, in Scotland. God damn it, I didn’t do enough—not nearly enough—to protect her.”

“Murderess?” said Mary. She’d been wondering how to tactfully take the piece of glass away from him, but this last statement had jolted her.

“Or murderer, if you’d rather,” said Shelley impatiently. “I—” He wasn’t able to finish, and for a moment Mary thought it was rage, rather than grief, that choked him. “And she was pregnant when they found her body!”

Mary couldn’t help being glad to hear it, for Shelley had been separated from Harriet for more than a year. “Well,” she ventured, “you have always said she was of weak character….”

Shelley stared at her. “What? Oh, you mean she’d been unfaithful. You don’t understand any of this, do you? Mary, she undoubtedly thought it was I. You should be able to grasp that, you thought it was I who was standing over—” He shook his head and clasped the piece of glass in his fist.

Suddenly Mary was afraid that she did understand, and she was frightened. She remembered his strange fears, and all at once they didn’t seem so ludicrous. “Percy, are you saying that—this thing you’re afraid of—”

Shelley wasn’t listening. “And her body was found floating in the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. The Serpentine! Was that damned …joke … necessary? She—he, it—can’t really have thought that I’d have failed to recognize its handiwork without this … this hint.”

Blood was dripping now from his fist, but Mary had forgotten about trying to get the piece of glass away from him. “Perhaps,” she said unsteadily as she sank into a chair, “you’d better tell me more about this … this doppelgänger of yours.”

Shelley left for London later that day, and in a letter that Mary received two days later Shelley proposed marriage to her; they were wed two weeks later, on the thirtieth of December, but Mary’s joy was marred a little by her suspicion that he had married her mainly to get legal custody of his two children by Harriet.

Two weeks after that, Claire’s child by Byron was born, a daughter that Claire christened Allegra, and by the end of February all of them had moved to a house in the little town of Marlow, thirty miles west of London.

Here Mary’s fears began to dissipate. Shelley failed to get custody of Harriet’s children, but Mary’s son and Claire’s daughter appeared to be healthy, and she soon discovered that she was pregnant again herself; the baby, a girl, was born in September, and they named her Clara.

Even Shelley was, tentatively, beginning to relax again. He kept a skiff moored on the bank of the Thames, only a three-minute walk from the house, and frequently went rowing up and down the waterway, though he still refused to learn to swim.

It was only in his writings that he seemed to express some of his old fears. He wrote a number of poems, but devoted most of the year to writing a long political poem that he at first called Laon and Cyntha but later retitled The Revolt of Islam. Mary carefully read all his verse—she was a little alarmed by a poem called Marianne’s Dream, in which a city consisting of mountains is destroyed by fire, and marble statues come briefly to life—but there was only one stanza, in The Revolt of Islam, that really disquieted her:

Many saw

Their own lean image everywhere, it went

A ghastlier self beside them, till the awe

Of that dread sight to self-destruction sent

Those shrieking victims …