The Stress of Her Regard (20 page)

He tucked the mirror fragment back into his pocket and resumed his scrambling crawl—but he was moving toward the sunlit ridge now, away from Byron and the monster.

Behind him he could hear Byron calling taunts at the indomitable thing, but Crawford didn't look back until he had reached the ridge and climbed up the projecting tree roots onto the rounded hump of it.

He was in sunlight now, and he fumbled the broken pieces of mirror out of his pocket and held up the biggest piece—but he could no longer make out Byron or the creature in the dimness below him. In panicky haste he caught the sun in the glass and began sweeping the bright spot of reflected glare back and forth across the shadowed hillside.

He heard the earthquake-roar again at one point, and with desperate hope he jerked the spot of light back to where it had just been—and though it was what he had hoped for, he shuddered to see that terrible head turn slowly toward him, and he nearly flung the piece of mirror away. The thing in the light shook its head and resumed climbing, flexing and stretching its long legs in the air—Crawford could now see Byron, only a few yards above the advancing form—but Crawford forced his hand not to shake, and to hold the spot of light in the center of the broad back.

The thing stopped again, and again the trees shook to a roar that was like a mountain shifting on its hell-foundationed base. Now the figure turned around and began ponderously levering its bulk across the slope toward Crawford.

He almost dropped the mirror and ran. Smoke-colored slabs of tooth were bared in what was unmistakably outraged fury, and its pincers were tearing up head-sized chunks of dirt, and even splitting stones, as it advanced toward him; and he knew that physical damage was not by any means the worst thing to be feared when facing such an entity as this. But he held his ground and forced his bladder to stay tight and kept the light centered on the thing's neck . . . where he could now see a torn spot, probably where Byron's branch-missile had struck it.

The thing was getting closer, and the shifting roar of its breathing now sounded like a distant, valley-filling orchestra; was the thing
singing
? Crawford found himself following the theme, and the tragic grandeur of it caught at the breath in his throat; lyrics sprang spontaneously into his mind, coruscating tapestries of language as intricate as the depths of an opal, and it seemed to him that this must be some antediluvian march composed by sentient planets to celebrate a wedding of suns.

But the music was fading, as if a wind had sprung up between himself and the vast but far-distant orchestra. The long-legged thing was only a few yards away now, but it was moving much more slowly, and it seemed to Crawford that a gold and purple aura was flickering around its head; and at last with an audible crack it froze.

For several taut seconds it continued to stare eyelessly at him while he held the light on its neck.

And at last it tipped, slowly at first and then with a massive rush, and its shoulders jarred the earth several yards downslope and then it was just a tumbling statue breaking up as it receded away, more audibly than visibly, below them.

When the crashing racket had diminished to silence, Crawford could hear someone clambering down the slope above them, and soon he heard Hobhouse shouting angrily.

"Here we are, Hobby," called Byron, his voice quavering only slightly. "And the luggage is wedged against a tree down here. Did the horses fall too?"

"Damn you for not answering before," yelled Hobhouse, grudging relief evident in his tone. "Yes, one horse fell, but not far and he's not hurt. What was that roaring? And what did you shoot at?"

Crawford had climbed, much more slowly and carefully now, halfway to Byron's perch, and when he looked up he saw the young lord wink at him. "Some species of mountain lion, I believe!" A frown crossed his haggard face for a moment, and he called, "Don't tell them about it back in England, there's a good lad! Hey? No sense worrying poor Augusta."

Soon Crawford had joined Byron on his rock, and from there he could see men hopping down the mountainside on a rope.

Byron held out his hand, which Crawford now noticed was torn and bloody. "Earn your keep, doctor."

Crawford took his hand and looked at the ragged wound. "What did you catch it on?" he asked, proud that he could speak levelly.

"Our . . . assailant," Byron said. "Before you managed to get your reflector working, that thing got up here. I pushed him back, and he slid down a little, but . . . he got his teeth into me." His smile was brightly bitter. "Redundant, in my case, of course . . . but this confirms my resolve to divest myself entirely of the connection, in the"—he swept his bloody hand in a gesture that encompassed the entirety of the Alps—"in the high places."

Crawford looked down at the stump of his own wedding ring finger, on which the bite scar was still visible, and he tried, with at least some success, to be glad that he was going along.

Byron developed a fever as they continued up the mountain and the sun burned its slow arc across the empty vault of the sky, and when they reached snow he took delight in showing Crawford how the sweat from his forehead, falling on a snowbank, made "the same dints as in a sieve." Several times he slipped and fell on the ice, and Hobhouse, clearly alarmed, kept throwing glances of suspicion at Crawford—who, doubtless because of the thinner air, was beginning to feel a little dizzy and disoriented himself.

Byron, though, was full of hectic cheer; at one point he gaily called Hobhouse's attention to a shepherd playing upon a pipe in a sky-bordering meadow across the valley—"Just like the ones we saw in Arcadia fifteen years ago . . . though, now I recollect it, they all carried muskets instead of crooks, and had their belts full of pistols"—and later, when their guide asked them to cross one mountain ledge in a hurry because of the danger of falling rocks, Byron just laughed and asked Hobhouse if he remembered the crowd of Greek workmen he had seen in 1810, who wouldn't carry an ancient statue to Lord Elgin's ship because they swore they'd heard the statue sobbing at the prospect of being sent across the water.

He seemed to recover himself for a little while at the peak of Mont Davant, from which vantage point they could see most of Lake Leman far below them to the west, Lake Neufchatel to the north and, ahead of them in the east, the remote, towering, patriarchal peaks of the canton of Bern.

He and Crawford had wandered away from the rest of the group, and were standing on a wind-scoured rock outcrop above the plateau of powder snow. Both men were sweating and shivering.

"You lied, I think," remarked Byron in the echoless silence of the sky, "when you told Hobhouse that you don't write poetry—hmm?"

Crawford, nervous about the abyss overhead, sat down and gripped the rock with damp hands. "Not precisely," he managed to answer. "I haven't
written
any—but I do find myself building . . . verses, images, metaphors, in my head, when I'm half asleep."

Byron nodded. "These creatures aren't especially good visually, but they are purely matches in a powder keg when it comes to language. I wonder how many of the world's great writers have owed their gift to the . . . ultimately disastrous attentions of the nephelim." His laughter was light and sarcastic. "And I wonder how many of them
would
have freed themselves, if they could have."

Crawford was sick, and he wasn't letting himself think about all the narrow ledges and steep climbs that lay between him and normal ground—and he was still trembling from their encounter with one of Byron's precious nephelim that morning, and didn't relish hearing anything even remotely good about the creatures. "I wonder if that was mistletoe," he snapped.

Byron blinked at him. "If what was?"

"The twig you shot at that beast this morning. Isn't that what Balder the Beautiful was killed with, in the Norse myths? A dart made of mistletoe? I guess that makes you Loki, Odin's evil brother."

Byron frowned, and Crawford wondered if he could actually be feeling bad about having shot at that monstrosity this morning.

"Balder," Byron said softly. "You're right, a wooden stake killed him. Christ! Do all of our most affecting legends, as well as our literature, derive from these devils?" He shook his head and looked down the west side of the mountain, and Crawford knew he was thinking of the hideous statue that lay shattered in the bottom of a ravine far below them.

Finally Byron looked up and met Crawford's gaze. "Loki came to a bad end, didn't he?" Byron said. "But I'm afraid his is the only example we can follow with any self-respect." He shivered and started back toward the others.

When the innkeeper handed her back her passport, Julia Carmody hoped that she could now let her phantom sister lie dormant in her head until . . . until the day when the sister would emerge, do what she had to do, and then disappear forever.

Julia had had to be Josephine two days ago in order to pick up the bank draft from her father at the Poste Restante in Geneva, and tonight, here in Clarens, getting a room had required that she show her passport; but she didn't want to touch the passport again until she was crossing international boundaries on the way home to Bexhill-on-Sea. And she didn't
ever
want to think about the anguished note that had accompanied the bank draft.

With luck she'd be home comfortably before Christmas, and her father would accept the way things were, or had turned out to be, and then she would be Julia for the rest of her life, and she could expunge the name and identity of Josephine from her memory.

A boy carried her bags upstairs, and when he had opened the door to her room she took only the hastiest glance inside, for she knew in advance what she would see—the same disgraceful thing she had seen in every rented room she'd been in since the twenty-first of July, her wedding day—and she had her sentence of French prepared.

"Oh!" she exclaimed after her first glimpse of the bed.
"Mon Dieu! Voulez-vous changer les draps!"
The sheets, as she had known they would be, were grossly blotted with dried blood.

The boy, of course, pretended to see nothing wrong with the sheets, but she gave him a handful of francs to have them changed anyway. A harassed-looking chambermaid was summoned, and when she had changed the offending bedclothes and departed, Julia opened the lake-facing window and lay down on the bed.

At dusk a wind from the mountains brought rain, and the rattle of it in the drainpipes woke her up. The room was dark and the curtains were flapping against the dark sky—

—And she couldn't remember who she was.

She was empty, a staring-eyed vacuum, and it was horrible. Dimly her body knew that there were several personalities who inhabited its head from time to time, and now it wanted one of them, any one of them, to appear; the throat buzzed with a sort of beseeching whimper . . . and suddenly, as if it was a gift from outside itself, the body had grateful access to language.

"Come,"
it croaked.
"Come in. I'm open to you. I need you."

Personality animated the body then—she was Julia again, but she was worried about this new development. Would this recur, this blankness? And could she count on it always being the Julia personality who would step in to fill the vacancy? Would it—

"Good evening, Julia," came a soft voice from the window side of the room.

She whirled in that direction with a gasp, and saw a bulky silhouette against the emerging stars; and she knew instantly that the Julia personality had not been the only entity that had responded to her body's desperate invitation.

Oddly, she wasn't frightened. "Good evening," she said hesitantly. "Can I . . . light the lamp?"

The figure chuckled—from its voice she knew it was masculine. "Of course."

She opened her tinderbox and struck the flint and steel over the lamp's wick, and yellow light grew and filled the room. She turned around to face her visitor.

He was a big, burly man with a prominent nose, and he was dressed, astonishingly, in the most formal court habit—a purple frockcoat with gold embroidery, a jabot and cravat, white silk stockings and black pumps. Awed, she curtsied.

He bowed and crossed to her, and though he limped, and winced when he reached out for her hand, his eyes were kind when he lifted her hand to his full lips.

"I can help you," he said, still holding her hand, "with . . . what you're here for. I can lead you to the man you want to find. He was protected against you before, but his protector is in another country now." He shook his head; the motion seemed to hurt him, and Josephine saw red lines like veins or cracks on the skin of his neck. "I wasn't going to disobey her, and hurt him—I just wanted to
look
at him—but he and his friend hurt me, terribly. So I'll help you."

He released her hand and limped across to the bed and lay down on it. Julia looked at the hand he'd kissed, and realized that the new sheets were fated to go the way of the first set, for blood was dripping energetically from a bite on the knuckles.

Her heart was hammering in her breast, and before she went to join him she turned away to catch her breath. The lamplight had grown brighter, and had made a dark mirror of the window panes, but she had been avoiding looking at her own reflection ever since her identity had started to become fragile two months ago, so she pulled the curtains across the glass. She didn't notice that, in the reflection, she was alone in the room except for a fragment of broken statuary on the bed.

We talk of Ghosts; neither Lord Byron or M. G. L[ewis]
seem to believe in them; and they both agree, in the very
face of reason, that none could believe in ghosts without
also believing in God. I do not think that all the persons
who profess to discredit these visitations really discredit
them, or, if they do in the daylight, are not admonished
by the approach of loneliness and midnight to think more
respectably of the world of shadows.