The Stress of Her Regard (9 page)

Keats was beside Crawford. "Get in here," he was saying harshly, "and deny having seen anything," He dragged Crawford back into the ward, where the patients were querulously demanding to know what was going on and who would carry them to safety if the building was under attack by Frenchmen. Keats told them that a nurse had gone mad and fired a pistol, and to Crawford's surprise that explanation seemed to calm them.

"Act stupid," Keats whispered. "They'll assume you are anyway, to be assigned to Lucas. Tell them this fellow"—he waved at the corpse in the bed—"was this way when we got here."

Crawford was about to protest that the patient really
had
been dead when they'd arrived, but before he could speak he looked down at the figure in the bed.

The body was collapsed, like a trolling net with the stiffening hoops taken out of it, and the mouth was now gaping and charred and toothless. When Crawford looked up, Keats was staring at him coldly.

"Your . . .
rescuer
. . . came out of that," Keats said. "If the old scavenger in the clergyman suit hadn't drained off some of the potency first, the thing probably would have killed that woman, in addition to stopping her shot."

The stones . . .
. . . . . .
Began to lose their hardness, to soften, slowly,
To take on form, to grow in size, a little,
Become less rough, to look like human beings,
Or anyway as much like human beings
As statues do, when the sculptor is only starting,
Images half blocked out. . . .

—Ovid,
Metamorphoses

Taking Keats's advice, Crawford thickened his voice a little and let his mouth tend to hang open when they were questioned by the senior surgeon; total bewilderment he didn't have to feign, nor a tendency to jump at any sudden motions around him. The senior surgeon told them that the nurse who had fired the gun had fled the hospital, so Crawford was able to say that he'd never seen her before and had no idea what she had hoped to accomplish. The condition of the corpse in the hospital bed was blamed on the ricocheted pistol ball, and it required an acting ability Crawford hadn't known he possessed to nod and agree that that sounded likely.

Keats was through for the day, and Crawford knew that his own days as a medical student were over now that Josephine had somehow found him, and so the two of them walked homeward together up Dean Street. Men were unloading bales of old clothes from several wagons by the south corner of St. Thomas's Hospital, and the yells from the vehicles of the merchants and cabbies blocked behind them were almost drowned out by the clamor of the dozen boys and dogs playing around the halted wheels, and for several minutes as Keats and Crawford shouldered their way through the crowd neither of them spoke.

Finally they were past the worst of the noise, and Crawford said, "John, what
was
that thing? That flying snake?"

Keats seemed bitterly amused. "Are you really trying to tell me you don't know?"

Crawford thought about it. "Yes," he said.

Keats stopped and stared at him, obviously angry. "How is that possible? How the hell much do you expect me to
believe
? Am I supposed to think, for instance, that your finger was really amputated because of gangrene?"

In spite of the fact that Keats was shorter than he and fourteen years his junior, Crawford stepped back and raised his hands placatingly. "That was a lie, I admit it." He wasn't sure he wanted to share any of his recent personal history with Keats, so he tried to change the subject. "You know, that fake priest was staring at my . . . at where my finger used to be." He shook his head in puzzlement. "It seemed to make him . . .
angry
."

"I daresay. Can you really not know about all this? He thought you were there for the same reason
he
was, and he was angry because you pretty clearly didn't need to be anymore."

"He was—what the devil are you saying, that he was there to get a
finger
amputated? And jealous because
I'm
missing one? John, I'm sorry, but this doesn't even—"

"Let's not talk about it in the street." Keats thought for a moment, then looked hard at Crawford. "Have you ever been to the Galatea, under the bridge?"

"Galatea? No. Is that a tavern? It sounds as if . . ." He let the sentence go, for he'd been about to say
as if the barmaids are living statues
. Instead he said, "Why is it under the bridge?"

Keats had already started walking forward. "For the same reason that trolls hang about under bridges," he called back over his shoulder.

The Galatea was indeed a tavern under London Bridge. After shuffling down a set of stone steps to the narrow river shore—into the shadows of the beached coal barges, where the two of them picked their way over unconscious drunkards and piles of rotting river weed—they stepped into the dank darkness under the bridge, and at one point even had to shuffle single file along a foot-wide ledge over the water, and Crawford wondered if there was another entrance for deliveries or if all the food and drink was delivered to the front door by boat.

They passed the place's warped windows before they got to the door; lamplight made luminous amber blobs in the crude glass, and it occurred to Crawford that sunlight must never get this far in under the wide stone belly of the bridge overhead. Nine tiny lamps burned over the door, and Crawford wondered if they might be just the remainders of a pattern of now mostly missing lights, for their positions—four in a cluster, then two, then three—seemed intentional.

Keats was in front, and pushed open the door and disappeared inside. When Crawford followed him in, he saw that there was no consistent floor to the place—every table was on its own shoulder or slab or projection of primordial masonry, connected by stairs and ladders to its neighbors, and each of the half-dozen oil lamps hung from the ceiling on a chain of unique length. Considering the place's location, Crawford wasn't surprised that it smelled of wet clay.

There were only a few customers huddled down there on this summer morning, and Keats led Crawford past them, in a winding, climbing course, to a table on an ancient pedestal in what Crawford assumed must have been the back of the place. One of the lamps swung in a subterranean breeze a couple of yards above the scarred black tabletop, but the shadows were impenetrable around them as they sat down.

"Wine?" suggested Keats with incongruous cheer. "Here you can get it served in an amethyst goblet—the ancient Greeks believed that wine lost its power to intoxicate if it were served that way. Lord Byron used to drink wine out of an amethyst skull."

"I read about that—but it was just a skull, I think, a plain old bone one," said Crawford, refusing to be intimidated by Keats's manner. "A monk's, I believe. He dug it up in his garden. And yes, wine would be just the thing on a day like this—sherry, if they've got a thick, strengthening one here."

A big, moustached man in an apron climbed up beside Keats and smiled at the two of them; Crawford guessed that he had grown the moustache to partially conceal the no doubt cancerous bump that disfigured his jaw. "Well now, look who we have here!" the man exclaimed. "After some company, are you, my men? Neffy on this fine day? I'm not sure who's around right now, but there'll certainly be several who'll pay for—"

"Have you met my friend?" interrupted Keats. "Mike Frankish, Pete Barker."

Barker bowed slightly. "Anyone who can persuade Mr. Keats to grace my estab—"

"Just drinks," interrupted Keats. "An oloroso sherry for my friend, and I'll have a glass of the house claret."

The man's smile remained mockingly knowing, but he repeated their orders and went away.

"He didn't know you." Keats sounded thoughtful. "And Barker knows all the neff-hosts in London."

"What is that, and why did you think I was one?"

The drinks arrived then, and Keats waited until Barker had climbed away into the darkness again. "Oh, you
are
one, Mike, or you'd be gripping the sides of the operating table right now while some doctor probed your abdomen for that pistol ball. But I knew it when I first saw you. There's no mistaking the mark—kind of an ill look about you that's all in the eyes. At first. Clearly you only became one recently—you couldn't live with the mark on you in any city for very long without noticing the kind of attention you'd be drawing—and anyway your finger still hasn't healed, and their bites heal quickly."

"It wasn't bitten off, damn it," Crawford said. "It was
shot
off."

Keats smiled. "I'm sure it seemed that way. Try telling that to the neffers, though—the people you'll be meeting who live the nefferlife."

More mystified than ever, Crawford drank some of the syrupy sherry and then set the glass down hard. "What," he said levelly, ignoring a faintly echoing groan from the darkness behind him, "is that?"

Keats spread his hands and opened his mouth to speak, then after a moment exhaled and grinned. "A sexual perversion, actually. More often than not, anyway. According to the police, it's a taste for congress with certain sorts of deformed people, like Barker there with his big jaw. According to its devotees, though, it's the pursuit of . . .
succubae, Lamiae
."

Crawford was both unhappy and amused. "So I'm the sort who'd mistake Barker for a beautiful female vampire, am I? Goddammit, John—"

"No, you're not one of the
pursuers
." He sighed. "The problem is that there
aren't
any pure-bred lamiae, pure-bred vampires, anymore." He squinted at Crawford. "Hardly any, that is. And so people nearly always make do with remote descendants of that race. And it's generally some sort of . . . tumor . . . that distinguishes such. The tumor is the evidence—the substance, in fact—of the kinship."

"And just knowing that some person, like your man Barker there, is descended from Lilith or somebody is enough to make him irresistible to these deviates? I swear to you, John—"

Keats overrode him. "The thing that blocked that pistol shot this morning was no half-breed. That was the most . . . poisonously
beautiful
example I've ever seen, and there are wealthy neffers that would get you a baronetcy and a manor and lands in exchange for just half an hour with it, even if they knew it would kill them." He shook his head almost enviously. "How on earth did you meet it?"

"Hell, man, you were there; it jumped out of that dead lad's throat, you said."

"No, it was able to use him as a . . . a channel, because he was one of the people with a trace of their stony blood—or, conceivably, a victim of one such—but it
came
because it knew
you
." He stopped, staring up into the darkness, then went on in a whisper. "Knew you and
felt some obligation
to you, as if you were . . . an actual member of the family, not just prey, like what the patrons of the Galatea would love to be. How did it happen? When did she bite off—" He smiled. "
Shoot
off your finger?"

"I never saw the thing before, honestly. And the finger was shot off by some man in Sussex. He didn't
look
like a vampire."

Keats looked skeptical.

"Damn it, I'm telling the truth! And how do
you
happen to know all this stuff, anyway? Are
you
a snarfie?"

The young man's smile was like smiles Crawford had seen by firelight aboard battle-locked ships at night, on the faces of young sailors who had survived much already and hoped to survive until dawn. "I guess maybe I am. I'm told I have the look, and the old
habitués
here think I'm very priggish to avoid this place, not give them the benefit of my situation. But if I am one, it was a consequence of my birth, and no choice of mine; I'm a . . . what, a
pursuee?
rather than a pursuer. I'm pretty certain you are too."

Keats stood up. "Ready to go? Come on, then. This is a good place to be out of." He threw down some coins and started toward the ladder closest to the distant gray glow that was the front windows.

A groan echoed hollowly from the other direction, from the dark depths of the place; glancing that way, Crawford thought he saw a cluster of figures around the foot of a cross, and he hesitantly took a step toward them.

Keats caught him by the arm. "No, St. Michael," he said softly. "Anyone who's here is here voluntarily."

After a few seconds Crawford shrugged and followed him.

Lamplight fell across Crawford's eyes as he blundered past one table, and the elderly man sitting at it stared at Crawford for a moment—and then bit one of his fingers, struggled out of his seat and followed Crawford all the way to the door, whining like a begging dog and waving his bleeding hand enticingly.

Back up at street level, Crawford's nervousness only increased. He was fairly sure Josephine hadn't followed them from the hospital, but she might well have given up on the idea of personal revenge and gone to the authorities, who could easily find out where he lived from the hospital records. Sheriffs might be waiting for him at the Dean Street house right now.

He was wondering how fully he could trust Keats when Keats spoke. "Since you haven't even referred to it, I guess you knew the nurse."

Deciding to trust the boy brought no feeling of relief. "Yes. She's my sister-in-law. She thinks I murdered my wife Saturday night." he peered ahead nervously. "Could we walk along the bank side to the west?"

Keats had his hands in his pockets and was staring at the pavement, and for several seconds he didn't answer. Then he squinted up at Crawford; it wasn't quite a smile. "Very well," he said quietly. "We could have a beer at Kusiak's—it's your round, and I have the feeling I'd better get it while I can."

They dodged across High Street between the jostling wagons, slowing again when they were under the overhang of the houses on the west side of the street. "She seems fairly sure of it," Keats remarked when they were walking down one of the narrow streets that paralleled the river. "Your sister-in-law, that is." The old housefronts to their right were bright with sunlight, and Crawford led Keats along on the left side of the street.