But perhaps Uncle John was simply coming back slowly, to his old attentive extent! Christina would have to go out into the sunlight to see if it once again stung.
And she urgently needed to speak with Maria and Gabriel. Maria was off teaching, but Gabriel would probably be at his house in Chelsea.
Christina hastily scribbled a note to Maria, then hurried to her bedroom to change into street clothes.
THE BAY WINDOWS OF the first-floor drawing room at Tudor House on Cheyne Walk faced the river and the shoreline elms and, farther off, the webby silhouettes of ships moored at the timber docks on the far side of the darkening water, but Gabriel Rossetti was looking impatiently toward the doorway in the southern end of the long room, beyond the big dining table and next to the cabinet full of Dutch china and Oriental curiosities.
He had just lit the gas jets, and now he laid the matchbox on the mantel of the marble fireplace. The burnt wood smell lingered in his nostrils.
“Yes?” he called again. “Dunn, is that you? Algy?”
He heard the scuff and rattle repeated in the corridor — and then two figures moved into the room.
The first was a small, thin boy draped in one of the black velvet curtains from the drawing room and carrying a ludicrous parasol made of sticks and dirty rags — on his feet he wore two cigar boxes that knocked and scraped on the wooden floor. Gabriel’s instant surprised anger chilled to horror when he looked more closely at the intruder’s face — the boy’s skin was gray and stretched so tightly over the teeth and cheekbones that the open mouth seemed to be simply the result of it splitting, and the eyelids looked inadequate to cover his blank black eyes.
But the second figure froze the breath in his throat — it was a tall, red-haired woman in a visibly damp white dress, and after seven years Gabriel recognized her face more by the hundreds of pictures he had done of it than by actual recollection — the face was that of his dead wife, Lizzie.
She was breathing audibly, and the floor creaked under her bare feet.
“Lizzie!” he burst out. He had tried, on a number of occasions since her death, to contact her in séances, but the spirits who had answered his questions had never really seemed to be her. Suddenly and terribly he missed her, missed the cheerful innocence that had first drawn him to her.
“Stay,” he went on dizzily, trying to ignore the hideous child beside her. “Don’t leave me again—”
The two figures interrupted him, speaking in unison; the child’s voice was a harsh quacking and the woman’s a metallic whine: “Call me Gogmagog.”
Gabriel flinched and stepped back, and he could feel his heart thudding rapidly in his chest. Now he could see the alien and almost inorganic alertness in the woman’s eyes, and he noted the slackness of the face.
“You’re the one—” he whispered; “I shot you, in the park — you can’t have my wife—”
The two figures took a step forward, and the fabric of the woman’s dress tore rottenly at the knee.
“We have both loved her,” they said again in their grating voices, “my husband and I. She has two true parents, a rarity.” The woman’s head inclined toward her small companion, and they went on, “My husband is free again now, but wounded — you need to renew your lapsed vows to him.”
Gabriel’s pistol was in his bedroom, dusty and neglected; he crouched to pick up a black iron poker from beside the fireplace, and he straightened and held it up like a fencing foil. “Cold iron,” he said, his voice shrilled by fear. “Come near me, either of you, and I’ll — I’ll bash you.” He squinted at the boy. “Are you her — husband?”
The little gray figure’s mouth opened wider, further exposing the prominent white teeth, and when he spoke now, the woman didn’t join him. “No — I am promised to someone else,” he said in his flat monotone. He waved a sticklike arm at the woman beside him. “Her husband is your uncle, who today I finally roused from his long sleep, which cost him much.”
The mirrors, Gabriel thought, the mirrors we put into Lizzie’s coffin. This awful child must have somehow removed them.
The walls of the parlor and entry hall downstairs were hung with dozens of mirrors — how had these two creatures got past them, if Maria and Christina were right about the properties of mirrors?
But the mirrors had apparently worked in the grave, at least for seven years. Gabriel now snatched up a silver platter from the table, scattering the letters and envelopes that had lain on it.
He held it up with the polished top side toward the two intruders.
“Look,” Gabriel cried, “look at your reflections!”
From behind the platter came their jarring, imperturbable voices: “Renew your vows. Invite him in.”
The sudden crash of shattering glass made Gabriel jump and drop the platter, which hit the floor with a ringing clang. He had scrambled back with his arm thrown up across his face, but his visitors were gone — apparently they had dived through the south bay window, for most of the panes were gone but no glass lay on the floor or the carpet.
Whimpering, he rushed forward through the suddenly cold air, but he ran toward the door to the hall and didn’t look at the window; and in the doorway he collided with a figure who was hurrying in. A glimpse of copper hair made Gabriel think that it was the vampire in Lizzie’s body again, and he grabbed for its throat—
But his hand closed on a stiff collar and tie and the lapel of a jacket; and, peering through tears, Gabriel saw that it was the much shorter and thinner figure of Swinburne.
“Gabriel!” Swinburne exclaimed, pushing his hand aside. “What on earth?”
“Algy,” gasped Gabriel, “Algy, I—”
Swinburne was peering past him into the drawing room, angling his oversized head to see down the length of it.
“Did they jump out the window?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes, Algy, they—!”
“Why?” Swinburne stared at Gabriel wide-eyed. “Gabriel, it was Lizzie! Alive!”
He ran past Gabriel to the window and leaned out through the ragged gap in the panes, his curly red hair blowing around his face.
“There’s no one visible below,” he said; then, “Christina!” he yelled out into the evening air. “Did you see anyone fall?” He leaned out as far as he could without touching the broken glass on the bottom edges. “Fall,” he repeated. “Oh, never mind, wait, we’ll be down in a moment!”
Gabriel made himself step up beside Swinburne at the window. He waved vaguely down at the figure of Christina, who had closed the street gate behind her and was hurrying toward the house, and then he cautiously inclined his own head out into the chilly breeze, but Swinburne was right — there were no figures on the narrow patch of grass or on the walk.
“Algy,” he said, “you were downstairs — did you invite them in?”
“Of course I did, it was Lizzie! — and some sick child. Come on!”
Gabriel stepped back from the window. “A dead child, Algy, and Lizzie was dead too. Is dead. That wasn’t her.”
“Of course it was her, she knew me! We’ve got to go downstairs; they’re probably hurt—”
Gabriel gripped his shoulder and shook him. “Algy, damn it, it was not her! It was a ghost, a demon in her form — do you think I wouldn’t know?”
“A demon?” Swinburne had raised his hands and now dropped them. He exhaled and brushed his windblown hair out of his face and squinted at Gabriel. “But it was not her ghost. I — that’s not how ghosts look, and her ghost — wouldn’t be here.” He looked out across the Cheyne Walk pavement to the dark river. “But she did know me,” he added quietly, almost to himself.