Her hand touched his shoulder, then slid down to his hand and squeezed it. “Thank you for staying,” she whispered. “You are — Oh, hell. Thank you.”
He could think of no answer, and only squeezed her hand in the moment before she drew it away.
With his boot he could feel the edge of a hole in the curved surface of the step, and, carefully sliding his leading foot around it to move ahead, Crawford felt a close concave wall in front of him with an opening in it; he reached up and down to trace the shape of the opening — it was tall and narrow, and the top third curved to the right so that he would have to go through sideways, leaning forward. Whatever this structure was, it appeared to have no straight lines or corners.
“Hole in the floor,” he told McKee softly. “Opening in the wall directly ahead.”
He could still see nothing, but he strongly sensed sentient presences on the far side of the curved slit in the stone wall.
He managed to whisper, “I’m stepping through.”
There was no reply beyond her fast breathing, so he gritted his teeth and slid through the narrow, bent gap and found himself standing on a smooth, slanted floor. The air was warmer on this side of the partition, and smelled of incense and machine oil.
McKee scraped through behind him, and her shoulder bumped his.
At that moment, glaringly bright yellow flames sprang up overhead all around them — Crawford yelled in surprise and leaped back, throwing one arm across his eyes, but the slick floor sloped up steeply behind him; his heels skidded and he found himself sitting down and sliding forward to where he’d been standing a moment before.
He stood up again, slowly, holding his arms out for balance. McKee had dropped to a tense crouch. Blinking and squinting, he could now see that they were in the narrower end of a large, roughly egg-shaped chamber, as if they had entered a barn-sized bubble in solid tan marble; torches blazed at intervals high up on the incurving walls.
A dozen vaguely man-shaped figures that seemed to be made of shifting mud swayed on a lower level in the middle of the chamber — the humming seemed to emanate from irregular sputtering holes in the fronts of their heads — but Crawford’s attention was helplessly fixed on the man who stood on a wide rise beyond them. They were of human height, but the man towered above them, and Crawford’s first impression was that the man was very far away, miles away, and stood as high as a mountain.
Then Crawford saw that the man held in his arms the little girl they had seen running away among the gravestones, and this restored the perspective — the man and the girl were no more than forty feet away — though Crawford’s eyes ached with the effort of trying to keep the man in focus.
The man’s outlines and colors flickered, as though he were a magic lantern projection, but at the same time he radiated so aggressive an impression of physical volume that his body seemed to possess mass beyond its boundaries, as if it occupied more space than ordinary dimensions permitted — what quality was this that transcended volume, as volume transcended mere area? It took Crawford a moment to note the mundane details — dark curly hair, a mustache, an indistinct black coat, and eyes like glittering black glass.
The mud figures below him all suddenly spoke clearly, in unison: “My name has been John Polidori,” and Crawford knew that the man beyond them was speaking through them.
“You are the fleshly origins of this child,” the voices went on, “and she is ready now to abandon the cords of merely human flesh.”
McKee took a step forward on the concave ivory floor. “No,” she said in a loud but level voice, raising her little bottle of crushed garlic, “she is not.”
Crawford desperately wished she hadn’t advanced, but he made himself shuffle forward to stand beside her. The bright torchlight was still making him squint, and he couldn’t stare directly at Polidori — but in his peripheral vision he could see the little girl swinging his watch on its chain.
McKee threw the opened bottle toward Polidori — and several of the mud figures instantly splashed upward in a single solid sheet; the bottle and its spilled contents cratered into the mud surface, which then collapsed back to the pit in the floor.
CHRISTINA NOTICED THAT SWINBURNE kept looking back toward the grave as the funeral party trudged away toward the stairs that led down toward the yard and the chapel and the waiting coaches. Does he think we left someone behind? she wondered.
When the group had descended the stairs from the lawns to the crushed-stone yard, Swinburne exhaled and shoved his hands into his coat pockets and looked around at the mourners — and then his eyes widened and he stepped back toward the rear of the group.
Christina looked in the direction Swinburne had been facing and saw that Trelawny was staring after him.
Trelawny caught her gaze and fell into step beside her. The white-bearded old man’s back was straight and his shoulders were almost militarily squared — in something like defiance, Christina thought.
“Who is the young poet?” he asked.
Christina glanced back after Swinburne. “He is a poet, actually! Algernon Swinburne.”
“One of your damned crowd? I should have expected it.”
“He’s a friend,” said Christina, “an especially good friend to Gabriel and Lizzie.”
“I daresay.”
“Thank you for coming,” she remembered to say.
“You mentioned, Diamonds, that you know where that statue is—”
“I don’t want to think about — I don’t want to think,” she said desperately. “‘The world is a tragedy to those that think,’” she recited at random, “‘a comedy to those that feel.’”
She had reversed Walpole’s aphorism, but Trelawny nodded, conceding the point. “Even from here I can feel his attention on you still, like heat from a fire. I won’t question you now.” He frowned for a moment, then said, “I once bought a Negro slave, in Charleston, in America, it must be thirty years ago now — shall I tell you about that?”
“Oh, yes, please,” said Christina, exhaling as if she’d been holding her breath. “As long as it’s not … relevant.”
“No, not relevant to anything this side of the Atlantic. They’re fighting a war to free the slaves over there now — well, I did my part back in, let’s see, in ’34, by buying this fellow and immediately freeing him…”
As he rambled on, Christina listened hungrily to each distracting detail, though she noted every step that took her farther away from the grave and the thing in her father’s throat. Soon, she thought, soon, our uncle’s terrible attention will fall off me like a snagged cape.
THE BLACKLY SHIMMERING FIGURE of Polidori still stood holding the little girl at the far side of the chamber.
“Garlic,” said the remaining mud figures, and then they made a rackety snuffling sound. “Sulfur, that is, and an agent that interferes with us binding ourselves to the defining spiral threads of your fabric.”
McKee had straightened up from her throw and stood beside Crawford, panting. Crawford gripped his own bottle of crushed garlic in his pocket and waited tensely for Polidori to go on, but for several seconds none of the figures in the chamber moved, and the only sound was an occasional pop from one of the torches stuck into holes high up in the domed ceiling. Polidori seemed to have stopped paying attention to the two intruders, and the little girl in his flickering arms was swinging Crawford’s watch and quietly reciting something in a nursery-rhyme cadence.
Crawford’s gaze darted around the chamber, and he noticed a wavy seam across the top of the dome, and the term that occurred to him was coronal suture. He blinked sweat from his eyes and looked at the low curling ridge to McKee’s left, and he thought, ethnoid bone and cribriform plate. We entered through the right superior orbital fissure, and we are standing on the frontal bone.