Deeply and gladly she inhaled the cold air, and she stretched her fingers on her lap, feeling as though she had at last shed a pair of gloves that she’d worn for decades.
His attention was always on me to some extent, she thought, during these seventeen years, and it’s finally completely gone.
I’m alone on my own.
LIKE A TAUT ROPE suddenly cut, the stretched awareness of the thing that was largely John Polidori snapped back — and then reflexively reached out again to reestablish the broken connection; and its attention fixed on what seemed to be its goal but was instead only streaks of familiar blood in grooves cut into a cluster of mirrors…
And the wave-form that was the Polidori thing’s identity was reflected back onto itself and instantly fragmented into a turbulence of nullifying contradictions and meaningless emphases.
A BOOMING CRASH OF collapsing masonry and the thudding of tons of dirt jarred Crawford, and he rolled over painfully on a wet floor, blinking at shadowed stone walls and coughing grit out of his throat. He could feel hot blood running from his nose and clotting in his mustache and beard, and he peered around him in the darkness, assuming that he was in a building that had partially collapsed.
He knew vaguely that there were a number of ages he might be, but he had no idea which of them might include this experience, whatever it was.
He could hear water rushing in a roofed channel very close by, and now he could dimly see that someone was lying on the stone floor near him — a woman. Had she been injured in the collapse? Had he? He tried to stop coughing and think.
Memories prickled in his consciousness, opening one clear area after another. He was older than he would have guessed, and he was wearing the torn ruins of a linen shirt and creased woolen trousers — he had been at a funeral! — and the dim radiance filtering down the shaft overhead was probably the light of a far-off overcast sky; the woman lying beside him was … was the mother of his daughter!
Then with a mental expansion that felt like his ears popping, he remembered it all, and he quickly rolled over to peer across the rushing stream; but through a haze of dust he saw that the stone platform and bridge-end that had been on that far side were gone now, buried under a new slope of jagged rock and freshly turned earth.
Johanna had been standing over there, with the Polidori thing.
He tilted his head back to stare up at the hole in the arched ceiling over the stream; the ceiling was high, and the light that touched the stone edges of the hole was very faint. He turned to look behind him, in the direction from which they’d come, but could see nothing.
He reached across and shook the woman’s shoulder. “Adelaide!” he whispered.
Her shoulder was yanked away and he heard her scramble into a crouch, suddenly panting.
“I’ve got a knife,” she gasped. “Come near me and I’ll kill you.”
“Adelaide, listen to me.” He got to his feet and reached toward her — then snatched his hand back and heard the blade whistle through the air where it had been.
“Keep back!” she said. “I’ll kill you and that Carpace bitch, both. Tell her—”
“Adelaide,” he interrupted, “Carpace is dead. I killed her. I’m John Crawford.”
She hesitated. “Killed her? What place is this? Strike a light.”
“I can’t. We’re underground, under Highgate Cemetery.” And our daughter is dead, he thought.
“Highgate — do you work at the Magdalen Penitentiary?”
“No, you’ve been out of there for … two years, I think you said.”
“What year is this?”
“1862. And we have to—”
“Ach, so old, all at once? And who are you?”
“John,” he said, “Crawford. I—”
“John!” For several seconds she didn’t move, and then her head whipped around to stare at the spot across the stream where the other stone platform had been.
And she wailed and fell to her knees when she saw the new slope of churned earth and rubble over there.
“Johanna!” she screamed; and then she screamed it again, making Crawford wince, but the third time her voice broke into sobbing.
After a few seconds, she caught her breath and choked, “What happened?”
“I don’t know!” He too was staring at the tumbled stone and dirt across the stream. “I–I believe I slowed him down, in his attack on you, when I interposed my head in his psychic vise — and then he began to crush us both — but I lost consciousness and revived only a moment before you did.”
“This is Sister Christina’s stroke,” said McKee softly. “It was her stroke that stopped him from crushing our minds, and crushed him instead — and my daughter.”
Our daughter, thought Crawford.
“There’s nothing more we can do,” he said. “We need to get out of here, back up to daylight.”
Slowly, panting as if she’d been running, McKee straightened and peered around in the darkness. To the right, the ledge they were on slanted uphill for at least some distance before it was lost in shadows, and he took her elbow.
She shook it off. “I saw into your head, when he was crushing us — you must have seen into mine.”
“I think so.” He remembered now the image of a wedding, but only said, “Just — distorted fragments.”
“That’s — all?”
“Yes. We’ve—”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes!” He spread his fingers and then clenched his fists and repeated, “We’ve got to get out of here!” He reached out and fumbled for her hand, but she snatched it away.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
“Wha — why?”
“Why do you think?” She was still panting. “We tried to save Johanna, and we failed, she died. I failed, which is shameful, and you failed, which is shameful.”
“For God’s sake, Adelaide,” he said, starting forward along the ledge and then pausing, “what more could we have done? Damn me, how is it that we did as much as we did?”
McKee stared again for several moments at the jagged slope on the other side of the stream. Then, “Let me lead the way,” she said quietly, stepping around him, “and please don’t speak unless you perceive some danger along our course.”
THEY GROPED THEIR WAY through pitch-blackness, in silence except for the scuff and stumble of their boots on stone and in mud, and when they came to cross-tunnels, or broad areas that seemed spacious judged by the echoes of their breathing, McKee shuffled around until she had found the uphill direction, and they followed that — though several times it crested out and led them farther down. Twice Crawford saw hints of reflected firelight far away down what must have been side corridors, and at one point, when he and McKee were edging along a narrow ledge over a pit, he heard monotonous singing or chanting far below. They clambered blindly over heaped stones that sometimes felt as if they’d been shaped by tools, and made their way up out of waist-deep pools by climbing ancient stone stairs, and edged around boulders made of rusted-together pieces of metal — Crawford’s fingers traced corroded spoons and sword hilts and coins of unguessable age all stuck together like clusters of barnacles.
After at least an hour, he and McKee found themselves walking along a concave floor that was straight and smooth but very slippery — the smell was now very bad, like full chamberpots and rotten eggs — and Crawford heard McKee patting a wall.
“This is modern brick,” she whispered. “The Northern High Level Sewer between Hampstead and Stoke Newington, it must be. There’ll be a ladder.”
And there was, though to find it they had to climb over two chest-high brick walls that McKee called diversion dams. The ladder rang faintly when McKee’s groping hand collided with it.