“Horses?” said McKee once they had all caught their breaths. “Horse ghosts?”
“Like the cats?” ventured Johanna. “Old friends?”
Crawford was surprised by the thought, and he hoped it was so.
Then his smile relaxed into a frown. “I met Trelawny’s Miss B.,” he said hesitantly, “in one of the other tunnels. She—”
“You went into another tunnel?” exclaimed McKee. It seemed to require an effort on her part not to draw away from him. “And you met her?“
“She was all — in pieces, and there were broken bits of black stone and sand on a table. Corresponding.” His heart was thumping again just recalling it, and he peered nervously back the way they’d come. “You remember Christina said that Trelawny had shrunk and hardened her and put her in a box. I believe he broke her up with a hammer too. She wanted my blood, and I ran out.”
“She must have been pretty sure she could talk you into it,” said Johanna thoughtfully. “She wouldn’t spend herself so much to become visible just on an off chance.”
Crawford heard unvoiced insight in his daughter’s remark, and he reminded himself that she too had experienced the dark elation of being severed from human concerns.
“She told me I’m Polidori’s son,” he said. “She said that in the summer of ’22, my mother—”
“Josephine,” said Johanna.
“Yes. I didn’t believe her.”
“Oh, why didn’t you wait for us at the Spotted Dog?” asked McKee.
“I did, I even napped for a bit, but the tough lads started to want the bottle.” He braced his feet on a window lintel and sighed. He thought of putting the pot down in some secure niche, then decided they’d have trouble finding it again. “I’ve never been so glad in my life as I was when you two dropped down the well back there.”
“We were glad to find you,” said Johanna. “Very.”
“We caught another cab,” said McKee, “right after that big boom, and went back to Tottenham Court Road, to — to see—” She paused and exhaled, shaking her head.
“We were sure we’d find you dead in the street,” said Johanna in a small voice. “Smashed flat.”
“Maria saved me,” he said, touching the bottle that was still in his coat pocket. Nuns and horses, he thought.
McKee pushed her hair back with both hands. “We looked,” she began, but her voice cracked; she took a deep breath and went on, “We looked around the area, but there was no sign of you.”
“Nor of the tall black-painted thing,” said Johanna with a shiver. “We kept our eyes out for it.”
“Sister Christina was probably giving it soup,” said McKee bitterly.
“But we—met — Rose,” said Johanna. “She had followed that thing, and she jumped at us from out of an alley.”
“Rose? Good God, Trelawny’s granddaughter? Was she — alive, still?”
“Yes — same as I was, when you saw me at Highgate Cemetery,” said Johanna. “Not dead and resurrected. And she — knows me, hates me. Tried to kill me.”
McKee took her daughter’s hand and said to Crawford, “She had a knife, but I blocked her first stab, and then we held her off with our own.” She barked out two syllables of a strained laugh. “We didn’t want to hurt her, but she surely wanted to hurt us.”
Crawford anxiously tried to see the faces and hands of his wife and daughter. “Were either of you cut?”
“No,” said Johanna, “nor her either. Well, maybe her hand. It was hard to see. There was no way to talk to her at all, much less grab her. We outran her — she’s not very strong now. I remember how that is.”
“Rose is,” said McKee, “furiously jealous that… Christina’s uncle … would apparently rather have Johanna. We really couldn’t hope to capture her — so we just — left her there.”
“And then we went off separately,” Johanna added, “to meet up at the Spotted Dog. By the time we both got there, you had already gone below.”
“Can I see the pot?” asked McKee.
“No, actually,” said Crawford, carefully handing it across, “but you can hold it. His boy tossed it to me, across the pit where Chichuwee’s place used to be. The boy said ‘the big vampire’ wiped out all the Hail Mary artists Wednesday night.”
“The same night the Mud Lark man came to me in my dream,” said Johanna.
“And William Rossetti’s son was born on Wednesday,” recalled McKee.
The glow from above was fading.
“Moon’s moving on,” said Crawford. “It’ll get pretty dark down here.”
“I think we’re better off down here than out under the night sky,” said Johanna.
“Too right,” agreed McKee. “We’ll climb out when we can see daylight. Here’s the pot back,” she added, handing the thing to Crawford and not letting go of it till he had both hands on it. “Don’t lose that.”
“I’m keeping my knife in my hand till dawn,” said Johanna.
THEY HAD TO KNOCK so much snow aside to crawl out of the hole in Portugal Street next morning, and the sky was so heavily overcast, that McKee said they were lucky to have seen the daylight at all.
All three of them had lost their hats during the night’s confusions, and McKee and Johanna had left their overcoats at the Spotted Dog, so Crawford gave Johanna his coat, and they were all shivering when a cab let them out at the corner of Bozier’s Court.
“Good Lord, it’s after seven o’clock!” said Crawford, peering down the street at the clock over the Oxford Music Hall.
“Hold your cab,” came Trelawny’s voice from the shadows under the pub awning. As Crawford waved at the driver, the old man hobbled out into the gray daylight and added, “It’s nearly half past seven. I had to sit through dawn Mass.” He wore no hat, and his collar was open.
“I wish we had,” said Johanna.
“Did the ghost speak?” asked Trelawny, holding the cab door for McKee and Johanna as they climbed back in, and then he called an address in Pelham Crescent to the driver and got in himself.
“Not yet,” said Crawford after he had stepped up last and sat down inside the cab next to Trelawny. The vehicle jolted into motion. “But we can boil it at your house. I’ve still got the ghost, and this,” he said, holding up his two spread hands, “is Chichuwee’s boiling pot.”
Trelawny simply reached out and tapped the invisible pot, then nodded. “You took it?”
“His assistant threw it to me, over the pit where Chichuwee’s chamber used to be. Polidori visited him right after you did. Lethally.”
“All the old Hail Mary men,” added Johanna.
Trelawny pursed his scarred lips, deepening the lines in his face, and Crawford reflected that the old man must be in his eighties by now.
Trelawny pulled the bell cord, and when the cab slowed, he half stood and pushed the door open, letting a gust of chilly air into the cab. “To the river, first,” he called up to the driver. “Steps, we want to get down to the water.”
He pulled the door shut and sat down again beside Crawford. “We need river water to boil,” he explained.
Johanna squinted tiredly at the old man. “My mother and I saw Rose last night, in the Tottenham Court Road. She’s still alive, not resurrected.”
Trelawny was still, staring at her. At last he said, “You didn’t — catch her?”
“We were lucky to keep her from killing us. No.”
Trelawny closed his eyes and shook his head. “He’s holding off, then, in hopes of getting you. That’s good — he’ll be like the dog in the fable, getting neither bone.” He opened his eyes and looked warily at Johanna. “No offense meant.”