On the far side of the chamber, Polidori was standing on the central ridge of the occipital bone. The mud things were standing down in the concavities of the temporal bone.
Crawford was suddenly shivering as if he were very cold, though he was able to think, objectively, We are inside a giant’s skull.
And as soon as he thought it, the light went dim and the air was moving and very cold and smelled of rust and wet stone; the floor under his feet had changed in an instant, and he skipped to keep his balance on what was now flat stone. He could hear water splashing and echoing.
His eyes were still dazzled by the vanished torchlight, and he took hold of McKee’s hand and peered ahead. The only light was a dim gray glow, possibly daylight reflecting down a shaft, from a gap in the arched stone ceiling.
They were standing on a projection of cracked old masonry, a stone ramp that was broken off jaggedly a yard in front of their boots, and below it rushed a shadowed stream about twenty feet across.
The tall darkly glowing figure on the far side, which at first Crawford mistook for a streak of residual retinal glare since it almost appeared to shift when he moved his eyes, must be Polidori.
Now Crawford could see that Polidori was standing on, or was projected onto, a similar broken ramp on that side; clearly there had once been a bridge across this stream. Crawford couldn’t see Johanna, but he heard her ongoing soft recitation mingle with the rattle of water against stone.
Polidori spoke in a deep and oily voice, and Johanna’s little-girl voice spoke too, matching his, syllable for syllable; Crawford was horrified to feel his own tongue and throat twitch, as if Polidori’s will were partly eclipsing his own too, even way over here on this side of the stream.
“The child and her organic father are strangers to each other,” said the voices of Polidori and Johanna, “but her mother loves her. The mother must be snuffed out.”
Johanna’s voice alone said, “Will you unravel her?” in a tone of mild curiosity.
“No, child,” answered Polidori’s not-quite-human voice, “that would leave a ghost unquiet in the river. I will crush her identity to nothing.”
McKee called hoarsely, “I do love you, Johanna!”
Crawford pulled his own bottle of garlic out of his pocket — there were apparently no mud men here to block his throw, and his free hand darted toward the screw-on lid—
— but Polidori had raised his arm, and the air solidified around Crawford’s hands and violently twisted the bottle away; he heard it splash into the stream.
“My garlic,” he whispered bleakly to McKee. “He reached across somehow before I could open it.”
McKee just exhaled.
“I’d like to have her ghost to keep with me,” said Johanna.
“You shall have the man’s ghost, if you like. I will simply kill him.”
“Unravel him?”
Polidori raised one hand.
Crawford grabbed McKee’s arm and took a quick step backward, but he was unable to pull her after him; he peered back to see what had caught her.
A black halo encircled McKee’s head, a ring so much darker than the surrounding gloom that it seemed to glow. Her face was in deeper shadow than it should have been, and he realized that her head was in a translucent globe that only looked like a ring because he was seeing the apparent boundary curve end-on.
He stopped trying to pull her. Crawford reached for McKee’s face — and he was able to push his hand into the dark globe against resistance, though tugging at her jaw didn’t move her head at all. He felt her rapid panicky breath on his hand in the moment before he drew it back — and then he took a deep breath and simply thrust his own head in beside hers.
The globe visibly expanded to enclose his head too, and he couldn’t hear or see anything, and his body had gone completely numb — he didn’t even know if he was still standing.
He was aware of two minds existing in a nonspatial proximity to his, one female and one male; the male one was in some sense vastly more prominent, and had begun exerting inexorable pressure on the female one, but—
Crawford’s mind spasmodically conjured up a string of images to fill the intolerable sensory vacuum and visualize what was happening: he imagined a walnut in a lever-operated nutcracker shaped like a squirrel with a gaping mouth; a hairy hand picking up one drinking glass and then fumbling it because it was actually two glasses, one nested in the other; a machinist stepping back from a workbench to wiggle one of the two handles of a pair of pliers so that the slip-joint would allow a wider spread of the jaws, for a grip bigger than had originally seemed necessary.
And then the imagined readjusted pliers were brought to bear and closed in and something began to go wrong with his mind. Memories intruded forcefully into his narrowed attention, broken and jammed together, like roof beams crashing into a bedroom under an unsustainable weight: the image of his son Girard replaced a dog that Crawford was cutting open for surgery; and he saw the heads of his parents on crows flying over the London Bridge; and his wife Veronica’s face instead of his own staring at him from a mirror, and then the mirror sprang forward and shattered against his forehead and Veronica’s mind was leaking into his.
Her memories were brutal — a hot haze of drunkenness veiled a dim view of naked men with the heads of bulls and birds of prey, and a wailing baby that was carried away by animated skeletons, and fingers tense on the wet grip of a knife—
And his flickering awareness grasped that these were not a distortion of Veronica’s memories, but of McKee’s—
Adelaide! he thought.
The psychic pressure increased, and he caught one last image from her smothered mind — it was of McKee in a white wedding dress in a church, and Crawford was standing beside her on the altar.
And then his mind was too compressed to sustain consciousness.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Now, sweet daughter, but one more sight,
And you may lie soft and sleep to-night.
We know in the vale what perils be:
Now look once more in the glass…
AT FIRST CHRISTINA thought the sense of constriction signaled the onset of a headache or some distress in her stomach, and she shifted on the leather carriage seat and looked away from Cayley to face the window and take deep breaths of the cold fresh air. The carriage had passed under the stone arch of Highgate Cemetery’s entrance and rocked in a left turn onto the road, and she dreaded the shaking of the increased speed that was sure to follow.
But the uncomfortable tightness was somewhere else, not in her — somewhere in the oppressive and unceasing attention of her uncle.
“Are you well, my dear?” asked Cayley, leaning forward solicitously.
Polidori’s disembodied attention was all to do with squeezing and crushing something, and Christina had to breathe deliberately just to convince herself that she could. She held up her hand to put off answering Cayley.
And then it was gone. She had apparently moved at last out of the sphere of Polidori’s ground-state attention, and she felt all at once lighter and younger. The increasing headwind sluicing through the open window as the horses quickened their pace was pleasantly cooling on her damp forehead.
“Yes, Charles,” she said, her voice lively with surprised relief, “I’m fine.”