And so he had abandoned, at least for the moment, the idea of calling Josephine back—he had decided that he was at least minimally better off with Julia than with the wind-up lady.
He was eerily sure that Josephine’s body was doing a perfect imitation of his dead wife, based on its two decades of close acquaintance with the subject; in effect he was only getting to know his wife now, six years after her death, and he was dismayed to find that he didn’t like her at all.
She had made it clear two days ago that she would not welcome any sexual advances as long as the two of them were still in this house, and he was sure that part of her chronic resentment arose from the fact that this declaration had not sent him packing.
The truth was that he no longer wanted sex with her. He knew now that he loved poor Josephine—who, for all he knew, might be dead herself, no longer even a dormant spark in her own abdicated brain.
The thought reminded him of Shelley’s agonized speculation that Allegra might still be alive and aware somewhere in her own nightmarishly revivified skull. We’re all prisoners in our own heads, he thought now as he considered the memories that bound himself, but at least most of us can speak to other people through the bars, and sometimes reach between them to clasp someone else’s hand.
“I did meet one gentleman here,” Julia went on, “an Englishman, last night on the beach. One of Shelley’s friends who came on that ship, I suppose. I hope he didn’t leave on it today. He’s a physician,” she added, emphasizing the word. Crawford was only a surgeon. “He said he could restore sight to my eye. He promised it.”
Crawford blinked in puzzlement for a moment—then he was on his feet, and leaning down to speak directly into her face. “Don’t go near that man,” he said harshly. “Don’t ever invite him in, do you understand me? This is important. He’s a … a murderer, I promise you. If you ever again speak to him I swear I will never leave here, and my London practice can go to hell.”
She smiled, visibly reassured. “Why, I believe you’re jealous! Do you really imagine that I’d flirt—or do anything more than flirt, at least—with another man, when I’m married to a successful doctor?”
He forced an answering smile.
Shelley launched the refitted Don Juan on Saturday—he and Williams and Roberts kept her out all day and well into the evening, slanting and tacking across the calm water of the Gulf, and returning her to her mooring only when the moon began to be veiled with clouds; Shelley’s spirits remained substantially restored until, during the late dinner, Claire tremulously told him that twice during the evening she had seen him pacing the terrace … before the Don Juan had returned.
Josephine only rolled her eyes impatiently and muttered something about alcoholism, but Shelley threw down his fork, got up, and pulled the drapes across the windows. “From now on we’ll keep these closed after dark,” he said.
Remembering Josephine’s meeting with what must have been the resurrected Polidori, Crawford nodded. “A good idea.”
Claire, halfway through her third tumbler of brandy, frowned, as if she could nearly remember some reason why Shelley should be opposed in this; she hastily drank some more of the brandy, and the momentary kinks of alertness relaxed out of her face.
There was something ill about Edward Williams’s smile that made Crawford stare at him even before he spoke. “But we can—we can open them later, can’t we, Percy?” Williams asked nervously. “I only mean that—that it’s sort of pleasant to be able to look out over the Gulf at night.”
Crawford glanced at Shelley, and saw that he had noticed it too.
“No, Ed,” Shelley said tiredly. “Look at the goddamned Gulf all you want during the day. The drapes stay closed from sundown to sunup.” He looked at Crawford and Josephine. “I think the Aickmans will be willing to … wash the windows with a solution that will help to enforce this.”
“Windows!” protested Josephine. “Impossible! My husband is a doctor, and I’m certainly no one’s maid! How do you dare to imagine that—”
“I’ll do it, Percy,” said Crawford quietly. “After everyone’s gone to bed.”
Josephine got up from the table and stormed into their room.
A couple of hours later, when the lights had been snuffed, Crawford smashed several dozen garlic cloves into a bucket of salt water, then dragged it into the dining room and pulled the drapes back and, with an old shirt, slopped the mixture across the window panes and the flat stones of the floor.
He was glad that there were no lights in the room, for he didn’t want to be able to recognize the several human forms that were bending and gesticulating silently in the darkness on the terrace outside.
Shelley and Roberts and the English boy Charles Vivian took the Don Juan out by themselves the next day, for Williams had a fever and only wanted to lie in bed all day. Crawford offered to examine him and do what he could in the way of prescribing something, but Williams hastily assured him that it wasn’t necessary. Crawford was nearly moved to tears to see the sick brightness in the man’s hitherto clear and humorous eyes.
At about noon Crawford put on a pair of cut-off trousers Shelley had given him and went downstairs. The wind was shaking the trees on the slope behind the house, and the Don Juan, running with the wind, was a speck of white on the southern horizon. Crawford walked into the water and began swimming. Since the death of Mary’s fetus a week ago he had been taking a long swim every day.
The water was bracingly chilly, and revulsion at his situation made him swim out quite a distance before he relaxed and floated on his back, at last letting himself enjoy the sun on his face and chest.
Today was Sunday. They were to sail for Livorno tomorrow, and then he would have to decide what to do about Josephine. He couldn’t possibly go back to England with her—could he, in good conscience, book passage for both of them and then jump ship, leaving her to travel alone? No—whether she was his wife or the woman he loved, he was bound to take better care of her than that. And Josephine might one day come back. He couldn’t assume that she was gone forever.
Twice more he had felt the lamia’s nearness in the night—both times “Julia” had recoiled from him, thinking he was about to violate their agreement about not having sex until they left La Spezia—and he knew Shelley was still helplessly paying his part of the bargain. The expense of spirit in a waste of shame, he thought, mentally repeating a line from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets that Shelley had haltingly recited recently.
He didn’t know what to do about Williams—drag him into the Alps and up the Wengern? With Julia along?—and though he had garlicked the windows and threshold of the children’s room, and given Jane Williams ludicrous-sounding instructions not to let the children talk to strangers when they were outside, he bleakly wondered how long it would be until one of them, probably Percy Florence, began wasting away.
At last he let his legs sink and looked back toward the house, and a slight chill passed across his belly; he had drifted out while he’d been carelessly floating, and was now about twice as far from shore as he had thought. His heart was thumping hard in his chest as he began swimming back toward shore.
He couldn’t see that he was making any progress at all, and he cursed his four-fingered left hand and his stiff left leg.
After several minutes he was breathless from swimming against the tide, and he thought that in spite of his struggles he had drifted out farther. The sun was hot on his balding scalp, and glittered blindingly on the glassy waves.
He forced himself to breathe slowly and tread water. You swim in at a slant, he told himself, that’s what everybody says. This is not where you die, understand me?
He tried to see which way the tide had taken him, so as to be able to swim inward in the same direction, but now he couldn’t make out where the house was. The stretch of green-speckled brown that was the mainland seemed featureless, and farther away than ever. The harsh purple sky and the sun seemed to be squeezing it away.
He took sever
al deep breaths and then kicked himself up as high out of the water as he could, and yelled, “Help!”—but the effort left him breathless, and the sound had not seemed to carry.
Tread water, he told himself; you can do that all day, can’t you? Hell, I remember a time in the Bay of Biscay when Boyd and I trod water for two hours straight, as an endurance contest, with friends swimming out to us to deliver fresh bottles of ale, and we only quit because it was clear that waiting for one of us to give up would require that the contest continue until well past dark. This current is much likelier to sweep you ashore somewhere than to take you right out of the Gulf into the open sea.
But even though he traded off between using his arms and using his legs, he could feel his muscles tightening like wires under his skin. Nearly a decade had passed since that contest, and he had clearly lost his youthful fitness somewhere along the line during the intervening years.
He forced himself to breathe evenly and slowly.
The loneliness was appalling. He was a tiny pocket of frightened agitation on the vast, indifferent face of the sea, as frail as a candle in a lost toy boat, and he thought that he wouldn’t even mind drowning if he could hear another person’s voice just once before going under forever.
He could call her.
The thought sent a shiver through his body. Could she get to him quickly enough? On such a sunny day? Somehow he was sure she could—she loved him, and she must have understood that he hadn’t really wanted to divorce her in the Alps. It might not even necessarily mean abandoning Josephine—once he was safely back ashore he could figure out some way to deal with that poor lunatic; certainly he’d be able to do more for her that way than by drowning out here.
He had been trying to favor his stiff left leg, but suddenly it knotted up tight with a muscle cramp that wrung a scream out of him. He flailed his arms to keep from sinking, but he knew that he had only perhaps a minute left.
And then to his own horror he realized that he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t call her. It meant that he was going to die out here, right now, but something—his love for Josephine, the love she had clearly felt for him on that too brief afternoon a week ago—made dying preferable to being possessed again by the lamia.
He tried to pray, but could only curse in angry panic.
The water closed over his head, and he looked up at the image of the sun wiggling on the surface. One more clear glimpse of it, he told himself desperately, just one more gasp of the sea air.
He made his hands claw out and down through the water, and his head poked out into the air—and he heard oar-locks knocking.
A moment later he heard Josephine’s voice screaming, “Michael!”
He discovered that he did still have a little strength left. He was sobbing with the pain of it, but he made his arms keep pushing the water out and down, and when an oar had spun through the air to splash near him, he managed to pull himself over to it and wrap his aching hands around the wide part of it.
A rope had been tied to the other end, and he nearly lost his grip when the line began to be pulled in; but at last his head collided with the planks of the boat, and he was being dragged in over the gunwale. He even managed to help a little.
His left leg was folded up tight, and hurt so badly that he really thought the bones might snap. He touched his thigh, and the knotted muscles were as hard as stone.
“Cramp,” he gasped, and a moment later she was massaging it with hands that had been made bloody by strenuous inexpert rowing. Her left hand, the one she had ruined on the Wengern, was itself visibly becoming clawed with cramp, but she worked strongly, with a nurse’s expertise, and after a minute the knot in his leg had been ground out.
For a long time he lay sprawled against one of the thwarts, just filling and emptying his lungs, his eyes shut. At last he sat up a little and looked around. The boat was one that Shelley had found too big to be convenient for rowing, and had stowed downstairs. There was no one in it but himself and Josephine.
He stared at her until he had regained his breath enough to be able to speak; then, “Who are you?” he asked bluntly.
At first he thought she wouldn’t answer; then she whispered, “Josephine.”
He lay back again. “Thank God.” He reached out and gently held her flayed, twisted hand. “How in hell did you even get this boat out of the house?”
“I don’t know. I had to.”
“I’m glad you noticed me out here. I’m glad you noticed me out here.” Julia, he thought, would never have done this.
Josephine sat back and pushed sweaty hair off her forehead. Her glass eye was staring crazily into the sky, but her good one was focused intently on him. “I … woke up from fright, I came back into my body, staring out the window at you and knowing you were in trouble. I had heard her noticing it—you understand?—and that was what gave me the strength to … push her aside, push J-Julia out. And then I was running down the stairs and wrestling this thing out through the arches and over the pavement and into the water.”
He saw that she was barefoot, and that there was blood on the floorboards too.
“Josephine,” he said unsteadily, “I love you. Don’t let Julia, your ghost of Julia, take your body, not ever again.”
“I—” For several seconds she tried to speak, then just shifted around toward the bow and shook her head. “I’ll try not to.”
That night was Midsummer’s Eve, and the two of them stayed up later than everyone else, though they could hear Ed Williams talking quietly, presumably to his wife, in his room.
Only one lamp burned, the lamp Shelley insisted burn all night, and Crawford and Josephine had finished the bottle of wine left over from dinner and were slowly working on another one that he had opened after that. They had talked for more than an hour, rarely even brushing any important topics, when, simultaneously, the latest pause in the conversation became the end of it and Crawford noticed that they had finished the wine.
He stood up and held his hand out to her. “Let’s go to bed.”
They went into their room and closed the door and undressed, and then in the darkness—for he had pulled the curtains across their window—they made long, slow love, stopping short of climax again and again until finally it was unstoppably upon them.
After a while Crawford rolled off of her and lay beside her, feeling her hot, dewy flank against his side; he opened his mouth to tell her softly that he loved her—
—And a shriek from another room interrupted him and sent him bounding out of bed.
For lack of anything else he pulled on Shelley’s cut-off trousers, then opened the door and stepped into the dining room; he could hear Josephine behind him struggling into clothes.
The door to the Shelleys’ room was open, and the tall, thin figure of Shelley came out quickly but without any sound. His eyes were glowing like a cat’s in the lamplight and, before pulling the drapes aside and disappearing onto the terrace outside, he crossed to Crawford and kissed him lightly on the lips. Crawford saw teeth glint in the open mouth, but they didn’t touch him.
Then Shelley came out of his room again, and Crawford realized that this was the real one—and when he realized who the first figure must have been, his chest went hollow and cold and he had half turned toward the terrace door before he remembered Josephine.
He made himself turn his back on the terrace and face Shelley.
CHAPTER 15
But the worm shall revive thee with kisses,
Thou shalt change and transmute as a god
As the rod to a serpent that hisses,
As the serpent again to a rod.
Thy life shall not cease though thou doff it;
Thou shalt live until evil be slain,
And good shall die first, said thy prophet,
Our Lady of Pain.
—A. C. Swinburne,
Dolores
“Where did it go?” Shelley demanded.
Not trusting himself to speak yet, Crawford simply pointed to
the drapes.
Shelley collapsed against the wall and rubbed his eyes. “It was trying to strangle her—strangle Mary.” He held up his hands, which were scratched and bloody. “I had to tear its hands away from Mary’s neck.”
The Williamses and Josephine were in the dining room now, and Shelley had pulled the drapes aside and, crouching, was licking his finger, rubbing it along the floor by the windows, then moving and licking it again. When he had hunched and licked his way down the whole length of the windows he looked up.
“There’s no salt nor garlic here,” he said, staring straight at Edward Williams.
Williams flinched, then mumbled, “Is that what that was? The smell—I just thought I’d wash them better—” He had buttoned up the collar of his nightshirt, but Crawford could see a spot of blood staining the fabric at his neck.
Shelley’s lips were a straight white line. “All of you go back to bed,” he said, “except you, Aickman—we’ve got to talk.”
“Josephine can hear it,” Crawford said.
Shelley blinked. “I thought her name was …? But very well, let her stay. Bed for the rest of you.”
Shelley was twisting a corkscrew into a fresh wine bottle when the Williamses closed their door, and he poured wine into the only lately abandoned glasses that Crawford and Josephine held out.
“We can’t leave tomorrow,” Shelley said quietly.
Crawford was glad that the person at his side was no longer Julia. “What are you talking about?” he whispered. “This makes it more urgent than ever that we leave! Did you see Ed’s neck? Will you wait until your last child is dead? I don’t—”
“Let him speak, Michael,” interrupted Josephine.
“She’s particularly accessible here,” Shelley went on, “and what I have in mind—the only thing left for me to try—requires that she be accessible.”