“I told you — I was in the infinite dark river, with the worms.”
“No, when you’ve told us the other way to banish your uncle.”
The steam said, “Oh — someone would have to cut Christina, so that she bled — she couldn’t do it herself. She would have to appear to be threatened. And then she would have to call for him, our uncle, as if for rescue. She would have to invite him back to herself. She would not want to do that, because she has always wanted to do that.”
The bubbles popped and the steam oval nodded.
“That — would not stop him,” put in McKee.
“No,” agreed the evanescent bubbles. “But he would come to her, in his human body — vulnerable, by daylight, not the … monster in the sky. And then there would have to be a death.”
For several seconds no more words came out of the bubbling brandy and river water, and Crawford cast a worried glance at McKee and opened his mouth, but the steam spoke again.
“I don’t want Christina to die,” it said.
“Well — no,” agreed Crawford.
“If she died there, and he were confined in the right sort of pentagram in daylight, I believe he would die too. Blood relatives, and the diabolical link. But for this, if she is to be able to keep me, and read to me—”
Again there was silence, and Crawford waited it out.
“I believe there would have to be a murder,” said the bubbles, and the emotionless monotone voice seemed grotesque now, “and Christina could catch the new ghost and use its agitated mental strength to double her own — and, still linked with our uncle by blood relation and her will, she could then stop our uncle, hold him in his human form. Forcibly. For a little while. He wouldn’t be able to fly away, as long as she was able to keep imposing his human form on him. He could still run — but I think he could be killed then, and stopped forever with silver and wood and cremation.”
Crawford was feeling nauseated, and he realized that it was a reaction to having made this frail phantom violate Maria’s principles by divulging this. But he remembered something McKee had said fourteen years ago: People who have let themselves be bitten by these devils can sometimes catch a very fresh ghost, ingest it, and it supposedly gives them extra psychic strength — lets them control the people around them for a minute or so.
“If it didn’t work,” said Johanna nervously, “we would — everybody present would be in big trouble.” She blinked. “Even if it did work.”
“‘Who is this?’” whispered the steam, and before anyone could answer, it went on, clearly quoting again, “‘and what is here? / And in the lighted palace near, / Died the sound of royal cheer; / And they crossed themselves for fear…’”
The steam oval dissolved in the air, and at the same moment Trelawny fumbled the bottle and got a fresh grip on it, as if it had moved in his hand. Crawford took it from him and shoved the cork back in the neck and set it on the table.
“We’ll return that to Christina,” he said.
“Yes,” McKee agreed weakly.
Crawford and Trelawny sat down at the table, both of them staring at the bottle.
After a while, “How can we … kill a person, to do this?” asked Johanna. “Plain murder.”
“I could do it,” said McKee in an unsteady voice. “If it was a stranger, and — and if I was drunk again.”
Crawford said quickly, “No, you couldn’t, Adelaide.”
Trelawny smiled at her, his eyes half closed. “I named you Rahab, not Jael.”
Crawford recalled that Jael had been the woman who, in the Book of Judges, had saved Israel by pounding a tent stake through the head of a Canaanite general.
“I could — to save Johanna,” McKee insisted. Her face was pale.
“And my granddaughter.” Trelawny sat back and looked around at the cupboards and the boiler and the racked knives as if he couldn’t recall how he had got here.
Johanna touched her mother’s hand. “I’ll do it. It won’t,” she added, staring at the bottle, “be the first time I’ve killed a person.”
“Is it not a couple of wild Bacchantes!” said Trelawny, smiling crookedly. “Ready to tear the head off a stranger! But no, children — I’m — eighty-four years old, as of last November.”
He stood up and crossed to the brick street-side wall and leaned against it between two of the gray-glowing windows, so that his expression was hard to make out.
“Have any of you read my book, Adventures of a Younger Son?” he asked. “No? Well, I never took you for a literate lot. It concerned my desertion from the British navy in India, and my subsequent career as a pirate on the Indian Ocean. In it I described my rescue of an Arab princess, Zela, and how I married her, and how she died in my arms. I know Byron always thought the whole thing was a bundle of lies.”
He sighed. “And — though I can still call poor lovely, loyal Zela up in my memory more clearly than I can my last wife—” He paused and then laughed softly. “Byron was right! This is difficult for me to admit, even to myself, after all these years, but — I didn’t desert the navy. I was honorably discharged at the age of twenty, in Bristol, because of having caught cholera. I was never a pirate, never met or married any Zela. I can hardly get my memory past the fictions now, all the sea battles and piracies, but I do know that they are fictions.”
He laced his fingers behind his head and stared at the ceiling.
“But then in Pisa in ’22 I met Shelley, and Byron, and became their friend. And after Shelley drowned, I sailed with Byron to Greece to fight for that nation’s independence from Turkey. Byron died in ’24, but I allied myself with a mountain bandit-king whose lair was a cave on Mount Parnassus. And I married his young sister — so in a way my imaginary Zela was really just a … premonition! And when we had a daughter, I named her Zella, slightly different spelling, to honor that dear figment.
“But — my bride’s brother, the mountain bandit — was one of several powerful men vying for the leadership of Greece in those days, and he was resolved to establish an alliance with the — the stony children of Deucalion and Pyrrha.”
Evidently stung by Trelawny’s assessment of her literacy, McKee explained stiffly to Johanna, “In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Deucalion and Pyrrha survived the great flood by setting sail in an ark, and they repopulated the earth afterward by throwing stones behind them, and the stones grew into people.”
“Into things that looked like people, sometimes, at any rate,” said Trelawny, nodding. “Deucalion and Pyrrha resurrected the Nephilim, pre-Adamite godlike monsters. By 1824, the Nephilim had been banished, but this chieftain was determined to call them up again and become something like a god himself.”
Trelawny rubbed one hand over his white-bearded face. “I — was young! — and I wanted the same, and I was willing to commit the large-scale human sacrifice the Nephilim required. In Euboea I killed … many Turks. Men, women, and children.” For several seconds he was silent. Then, “And I was betrayed,” he went on. “I was shot in the back with one of the living stones, so that I would merely become the bridge between the two species. The ball was fired clay, and it broke against my bones, but”—he paused to touch the base of his throat—“as you know, it’s been growing back, and with it the power of the Nephilim.”