The Stress of Her Regard (12 page)

He slept, and didn't wake up until the ship was rocking in ocean swells, and moonlight rimmed the porthole edges and raised faint points of glitter on the higher gravel piles. The hold was chilly, and he wished he hadn't lost the rest of his clothes. Despite the sea air, his head was filled with the smell of river-bottom rock.

Then he heard gravel shift, once, somewhere out across the deck, and he realized suddenly that it was the same noise that had awakened him.

A rat, he told himself nervously. Fattened on whatever cargo this ship carried to London, and now left with nothing to nibble on except gravel and my face. Better not sleep anymore. Too cold anyway—and getting colder by the moment.

The rattle came again, prolonged this time as though someone were letting the gravel run out from between cupped hands; then there was a noise like something heavy being dragged along. In the darkness the hold seemed vast, and the noise sounded far away, but he got an impression of terrible weight moving out there.

Crawford was suddenly much colder. Whatever that is, he thought, it isn't a rat.

Dimly he could see that something had stood up in some farther region of the deck, something tall and broad. It wasn't human.

Crawford stopped breathing, and even closed his eyes in case the thing could sense his gaze, and though he knew that even the most labored heartbeat can't be heard at any distance, he was afraid that the shaking his own heart was giving him would knock him audibly against the partition of the bin.

But a moment later he was horrified to realize that a perverse impulse to
make
some noise was building in him; he managed, with some difficulty, to suppress it.

The thing was moving—walking, to judge by the regular, ponderous jars Crawford felt through the deck—and he opened his eyes in fear or even eagerness in case it might be coming toward him; but it was crossing to one of the portholes, and as it got closer to the moonlit circle he could see it more and more clearly.

Its torso seemed to be a huge bag at one moment and a boulder in the next, and the surface of it was all bumpy like chain mail; and when it had plodded its way on elephantine legs to the porthole, he could see that its head was just an angular lump with shadows that implied cheekbones and eye sockets and a slab of jaw.

Oddly, it seemed female to him.

It didn't have arms to rest on the porthole rim, but Crawford sensed something weary about it—he got the impression that it had had no particular purpose in getting up . . . that it was just looking thoughtfully out at the sea as any sleepless voyager might.

For many long moments neither of them moved; Crawford lay stiff with something like terror, trying not even to tremble in the intense cold, and the thing by the porthole just stared out, though it didn't seem to have eyes. Then finally it stepped back, grinding gravel to powder under its inconceivable feet, and it turned and faced Crawford across hundreds of feet of deck.

He was in total darkness, but he knew intuitively that the figure saw him, saw him by his body heat rather than by any light, and recognized him, knew him. Crawford wondered desperately how long he would be able to continue to keep from screaming—and again he almost
wanted
to scream, wanted it to come toward him.

But the thing didn't approach him. It turned away and shambled back out across the deck into the darkness from which it had emerged, and after a few minutes he heard a long, rattling whisper of sifting gravel, and he knew that the thing had relaxed its sketchily anthropoid form back into the tiny stones that had comprised it.

It took Crawford a long time to get back to sleep.

Ye that see in darkness,
Say, what have ye found?

—Clark Ashton Smith,
Nyctalops

Something bumped against the hull, and Crawford awakened instantly, thinking that the gravel creature was up and moving around again—but the whole ship was creaking and rocking, and he could hear voices and the clumping of boots from overhead, and he guessed that they were arriving at their destination. After a few minutes his guess was confirmed by the splash of the anchor hitting the water. It was still night, unless somebody had fastened covers over the portholes.

He stood up quietly and groped his way to the porthole he'd come in through, being careful not to blunder out across the deck, and even when he was still yards short of the porthole the incoming land-scented breeze let him know that there was no cover in place, and that dawn had not yet come.

He poked his head out, and by starlight he could see a long stretch of land across a wide expanse of calm water, and he knew the ship was in some harbor. The air was hardly chilly at all now, leading him to believe that the ship must have sailed south—so this was France, or just possibly if they had made very good speed and exhaustion had made him sleep much longer than he thought, Spain.

He took off his boots and tied them together with his belt so that he could carry them while swimming, then set them down and peered out to fore and aft, trying to decide when he'd best be able to jump into the water unobserved . . . but when gravel shifted somewhere on the deck behind him he just sprang through the porthole in a somersault, touching the rim with nothing but his fingertips.

He hit water feetfirst, and plunged far down into the shockingly cold depths.

And he woke up completely; the seawater cleared his head of the feverish confusion that had plagued him throughout the last week, and as he began frog-kicking back up toward the water's invisible surface he was already making plans.

He would return to England somehow and vindicate himself—after all, he was a respected doctor, and no jury could judge him even
physically
capable of doing what had been done to Julia—and he would shake this weird obsession with Switzerland. Keats's tales were self-evidently the fantasies of an imaginative would-be poet. Crawford didn't understand how he could even have listened to such nonsense.

Then he broke the surface and gulped air, and the doubts fell in on him again. He began paddling toward the stern of the ship, for the sound of voices seemed to be louder up by the bow, and he had already dismissed his momentary hope of returning to England and vindicating himself. You've already crossed the channel, he told himself; the Alps—the majestic, towering, dream-known Alps—are ahead of you. You can't possibly turn back now.

Hell, he thought, even if you
could
go back safely . . .

When he rounded the high, square stern he saw that the ship's anchorage was a good distance out from shore. The sky had only begun to glow a deep predawn purple over some hills far away across the black water on his right, but he was able to see a shoreline ahead of him, and patches of trees that seemed to shine faintly on the rising land beyond.

He looked back up at the ship, and was blinded by the relatively glaring light that shone from the cabin windows; he glanced away for several seconds as he quietly treaded water, and then squinted back, avoiding looking directly at the lights. There was one man visible on deck, his face and hands strangely luminous against the dark sky, but he was looking at the mainland, not down at Crawford, who turned away and began paddling silently toward shore.

After ten minutes of swimming he stopped berating himself for having jumped without grabbing his boots, for he knew now that he'd never have been able to drag them along with him all this way . . . but he was sorry that he'd used his belt to tie them together.

It made him nervous to be swimming in deep water without anything to lean on if he should get tired—he was reminded of dreams in which he could fly, but was always hundreds of feet in the air when his arms began to cramp from the furious flapping necessary to keep him aloft. Could he still get back to the ship? He turned and looked back, but the ship was now as distant behind him as the shore was ahead. Fighting down panic, he resumed his course. He had never felt as alone and unprotected . . . and when his knees and feet eventually bumped against sand, and he realized that he had reached shallow water, he wanted to nuzzle the gritty stuff like a strayed sheep finally found by the sleepless shepherd.

The sky was gray in the east now, and the trees on the distant hills had lost their luminosity. When he stood up and began wading to shore he saw low buildings—houses and a church tower—a few hundred yards ahead, and he paused, wondering what to do now. The surf swirled around his bare ankles, feeling warmer than the air now.

His French was no better than utilitarian—assuming this
was
France, which he hoped, for he knew
no
Spanish—and this didn't look like a gathering spot for cosmopolitans. France and England had been at war too recently for the general populace to be eager to help a lost Britisher. The only marketable skill he had was doctoring, and he couldn't imagine a crowd of peasants being eager to let him set their broken bones . . . much less let him attend to their pregnant wives.

Would the shopkeepers accept British money?
Wet
British money? If not, how was he even to get beer and bread and dry clothes?

The bell in the church tower began ringing, rolling its harsh notes away across the echoless gray salt flats, and he wished he were Catholic so that he could ask for sanctuary; or a mason or a rosicrucian or something, able to turn to his secret brethren for help.

As he walked up the sand slope it occurred to him that he
was
a member of a secret brotherhood . . . though he didn't know if they were at all concerned with helping one another.

Let's see, he thought, do I know any passwords? Neffy? God knows what that might mean in French. Should I wave a bloody handkerchief? Stick a pebble in my cheek like a squirrel and wink at people?

Then he remembered what Keats had said about the unmistakable "look" a neffer had—he'd said that Crawford must newly have become one, or he'd be used to getting attention from strangers who could recognize that look.

So he just walked around the little town, shivering in the onshore breeze and smiling at the fishermen who trudged past him down the broad lanes toward the beached dories, and then at the people who began ambling up to open the shops. Many of them looked twice at the haggard, soaked figure, but none of their gazes seemed to hold the kind of interest he was looking for.

Eventually he found a warm chimney and leaned against it, and it was there that the very old man in the dun-colored cassock found him, Crawford noticed him when he was still a dozen yards up the street—and the old man was hunching along so slowly, seeming to put the whole weight of his frail body on his gnarled walking stick with each step, that Crawford had plenty of time to study him.

Strong-looking yellow teeth were exposed when the leathery cheeks pulled back in a grin, and from deep in wrinkle-bordered sockets glittered an alert and humorous gaze; but Crawford wanted to look away, for it was somehow clear to him that longevity had been more costly to this man than it was to most. The figure stopped in front of him.

Then the old man spoke, and Crawford swore softly to himself, for the language had the rhythmic precision of southern Europe and the Mediterranean, and none of the skating, back-of-the-nose elision of Picardy or Normandy.

For several seconds he tried to recall any Spanish phrases . . . and couldn't. But perhaps the man
also
spoke French.

"Uh," Crawford began, desperately mustering his words,
"Parlez-vous francais? Je parle francais—un peu."

The old man laughed and spoke again, and this time Crawford understood a few words; apparently the old man was insisting that he was speaking French.

"Oh, really? Well,
bonjour, Monsieur
, Listen,
non j'ai une passepon, mais
—"

The old man interrupted with a question that sounded like
Essay kuh votray fahmay ay la?

Crawford blinked, then shook his head and shrugged.
"Repetez, s'il vous plait—et parlez lentement."
It was the French sentence he always used most—a plea to repeat and speak more slowly.

The old man complied, and Crawford realized that he was indeed speaking French, but was pronouncing all the usually unaccented final
e's.
The question had been,
Is your wife here?

"Non, non . . ."
Good God, he thought, has he got me confused with someone else? Or did he see my wedding ring? No, that's right, it went with the finger. "
Non, je suis seul
, alone, you understand. Now
envers mon passepon . . .
"

The old man put a finger to his lips, then winked and began limping away, waving his stick in front of him between each step as if to hold Crawford's attention.

But something else had already caught his attention—the old man, too, was missing his wedding-ring finger.

The old man led him out of the village east along the shore, skirting hills that were purple with a richness of heather Crawford hadn't seen since leaving Scotland, finally to a tiny house made from the bow half of an overturned fishing boat. The sawn sides had been boarded across and fitted with a low door and a head-sized window, and a few yards away crude wooden steps led down among piled rocks to a tide pool that was overhung with tangles of nets and lines and scaffolds.

Crawford's guide dragged open the little door for him, and Crawford sidled inside in something like a fencer's crouch. Archaic-looking books and liquor bottles filled the dim triangular room, but there was a square indentation in the dirt floor, and Crawford sat down there.

The bow corner of the room was a little fireplace, and Crawford moved some pans aside so as not to have to sit on his feet. . . . He paused before setting the pans down, for though they were of an ordinary silvery color, they were much lighter than any metal he'd ever handled.

The old man was grinning again when he followed Crawford in and perched on a stack of books, and in his outlandish French he remarked that Crawford was sitting where the old man's wife had always sat; but before Crawford could apologize or ask if the wife was likely to appear soon and demand her seat, the old man was talking again.