“Oh,” said Christina. “Of course.”
“Our father is buried at Highgate,” said Gabriel.
“He’s safe,” said Christina. “He died clean, with God’s name on his lips and in the midst of garlic and cold iron.”
Crawford glanced at Christina Rossetti — Sister Christina! — and wondered if this serious and respectable young lady might know even more about the occult world than McKee did.
“And we know,” said Gabriel, “who the vampire father is.” His eyes glittered under the broad brim of his hat.
Christina sighed, blowing away a plume of steamy breath, and Gabriel gave her a look that seemed almost reproachful.
“Over there,” said Christina, pointing with her free hand away across the white-dusted dead grass plain to the right, “are the zoo cages.”
She stepped off the path and onto the faintly crunching grass. The skirts of her coat flapped around her boots.
“We’ve got more privacy out here,” said Gabriel impatiently, following her.
“There are cages outside the wall,” Christina said, “on the west side. They’re empty in the winter, nobody’d be out there on a day like this.”
McKee and Crawford looked at each other and shrugged, then trudged after the Rossettis.
“Sister Christina,” called McKee, “who is the vampire father?”
Christina swung her parasol aside and looked back over her shoulder, still walking. “You deserve to know, since one of us woke him and the other brought him to you. It’s our uncle, my mother’s brother. His name is—”
“Best left unsaid!” interrupted Gabriel. “Even in daylight.”
“Your uncle?” exclaimed McKee, stopping on the grass.
“Yes.” Christina halted too, and she tucked the parasol handle under her arm to take hold of McKee’s hand; and with the forefinger of her gloved right hand she began stroking McKee’s palm. After a moment Crawford realized that Christina was drawing a series of letters.
“I know you can read, Adelaide,” said Christina. “Can you remember that name?”
“Yes,” said McKee, frowning down at Christina’s scrawling finger, “yes, but if it’s—”
“He killed himself in 1821.” Christina released McKee’s hand and resumed walking, gripping the parasol handle again. “He had tried to enter a monastery, but they wouldn’t have him — I can’t blame them, since by that time he was—” She waved vaguely.
“Pledged to death and eventual resurrection,” suggested McKee with a brittle smile as she stepped after her.
Gabriel was striding along beside Christina, but Crawford took a moment to look around at the desolate park grounds before rejoining his peculiar companions. The man with the dog had passed them, well to the north — Crawford noticed that the dog appeared to be tied up in some sort of flapping shawl against the cold.
Christina was still leading the way across the frostbitten grass, and Crawford saw her bonneted head nod. “Not the resurrection Christ bought for us.”
“I knew,” began McKee, and Crawford could see that she was speaking carefully, “that Mr. Rossetti here—”
“Call me Gabriel,” said Christina’s brother in a tight voice; and Crawford remembered, with a surprising surge of jealousy, what McKee had said yesterday morning when she had asked Crawford to call her by her first name: I think we can consider ourselves amply introduced. Of course she and this Gabriel fellow with his foolish hat had been similarly … introduced.
McKee went on in a tight voice, “I knew that Gabriel had brought — your uncle’s! — attentions to me, and to my daughter. But do you say you — woke him?”
Christina’s shoulders rose and fell. “I did. I was fourteen.”
“Our father forced it on her,” said Gabriel gruffly, taking his sister’s arm as they all trudged across the grass.
“At first I thought it was our uncle’s ghost,” said Christina. “Well, it was, in a way. I invited him in because I felt sorry for him, and he was family … but it wasn’t really him, not really.”
“Our father,” said Gabriel, “had a little statue that he’d acquired in Italy. No bigger than your thumb. We always, even as children, knew it was alive.”
“It wore the doomed soul of our uncle,” Christina went on, “but it was one of the — a dormant, petrified, condensed member of the — well, you know the term that Gabriel would advise me not to say out loud here. The tribe that troubles us, the giants that were in the earth in those days.”
The Nephilim, thought Crawford with a shudder. They were mentioned in the Old Testament book of Genesis, and the writer of the book of Numbers described encountering them: we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.
The man with the dog had reached the eastern edge of the park, but he had paused in the outer circle road.
“That,” said McKee, “would have been in about 1850?”
“1845,” said Christina, glancing back at her in evident surprise.
“They had been dormant then for twenty or thirty years,” said McKee. “From about 1850 onward, they’ve been active again.” To Gabriel she said, “It was 1855 when you brought your uncle to me.” She shook her head and gave Crawford a wide-eyed look. “Was I right about coming here? We’ve found the monster’s very family!”
“It’s true,” said Christina mournfully.
Crawford was looking at her, and so he didn’t see why Gabriel had abruptly leaped to one side and drawn a revolver from under his coat and McKee was suddenly crouching and holding a short-bladed knife; both of them were squinting past Crawford to the east.
Crawford spun in that direction, losing his footing and falling to one knee as his left hand tore open his coat so that his right could dive into his waistcoat pocket.
The dog in the shawl was sixty feet away and rushing directly at them, tearing up spurts of snow and dirt — and somehow its lunging head was entirely wrapped in gray cloth—
— Crawford’s vision narrowed in shrill shock when he realized that it wasn’t a dog at all, but a little misshapen human figure, wrapped in cloth like a mummy, its knees and elbows flexing rapidly like spider limbs as it ate up the intervening ground—
A loud bang like a hammer on stone numbed Crawford’s ears, and the rushing figure did a ragged backflip, spasmodically ripping at the ground even as it still slid heavily toward them; Gabriel’s second shot stopped its slide, and his third and fourth shots shook the creature violently. Faint echoes of the shots were batted back from the distant Cumberland Terrace housefronts.
Crawford stared, the wind cold on his wide eyes — the thing’s limbs were retracting; it was shrinking inside its flapping cloth coverings even as it thrashed furiously.
The frozen ground seemed to shiver, and for a moment the ringing in Crawford’s ears seemed to be a remote chorus climbing through impossibly high notes to inaudibility.
Gabriel fired his revolver twice more at the heaving pile of cloth; bits of thread and sprays of black dirt flew away from the ragged holes.
The man who had been walking with the thing was running up now, but he was running a good deal more slowly than the creature had, and he was still twenty yards distant. He was carrying a black angular case, and Crawford wondered if he were a doctor. Far too late, he thought.
Crawford looked back at the women. Both were standing and staring at the subsiding cloth-covered mound. McKee caught his eye and actually grinned, tensely.
Crawford found that he couldn’t smile. His face was stinging with sweat, and his hands were shaking.