The snake-thing convulsed, hissing and spitting out a spray of blood and blinking its huge eyes. Its coils loosened, and Byron shook them off and rolled weakly away, sobbing and whooping.
Crawford backed away from the monster, toward Josephine, as the gold-foil wings began thrashing and buzzing, blowing sand away across the flagstones.
The thing that had been Polidori rose up into the air again, its weight apparent in the ponderous swinging of its body. For a moment the head swung back and forth in the chilly breeze, peering uselessly through the blood and glass and garlic that fouled its eyes.
Then, hanging in the air at shoulder height, the thing shuddered, and its face began squirming, reshaping itself. The snout crumpled inward and widened and, grotesquely, became a fleshy human mouth in the reptilian face. “Where is the child?” said the mouth. Its voice was hoarse and breathless, as if the creature had not had time to mold more than rudimentary vocal organs. “Where are you, Josephine?”
Suddenly Crawford guessed that the child was terribly important to it, much more important than Josephine; that children who were born into submission, as Keats and Shelley had been, were a particular victory for its species. He crouched over Josephine and clamped his bleeding hand over her mouth, but she squirmed away from under him with surprising strength.
“Here,” she gasped. “Take me.”
The thing’s head snapped around toward her hungrily, and as the long body shot forward through the air Crawford grabbed Josephine around the waist with his free arm and, with an effort that seemed to dislocate his shoulder and spine, heaved her back.
The serpent’s head cracked so hard against the pavement where she had been that chips of stone whistled through the air, and its body rebounded up and crashed against the top of one of the building’s pillars with an impact that made the Casa Magni resound like a vast stone drum.
The thing hung higher in the air now, about twenty feet above the pavement, and its furiously buzzing wings were blurs of reflecting gold around the downward peering face. The mouth had been shattered against the stones, and blood ran from it in a long, swaying string, but it managed to produce one word.
“Where?”
Crawford’s arm was still around Josephine, and he felt her draw in a breath to answer.
In an unreasoning burst of jealous fury he released her and snatched the pistol from his pocket, and only after he had cocked it and aimed it up at the devastated mouth that she preferred to his own did it occur to him that Polidori had compromised his invulnerability by adopting this piece of human anatomy.
Crawford pulled the trigger, and beyond the flare of the explosion he saw the serpent cartwheel away upward through the air, and over the echoes of the bang he heard it scream shrilly like blocks of stone sliding rapidly across each other.
Josephine screamed too, wrenching at her bonds so hard that Crawford thought she would break bones.
He stood up, and limped over to where Byron lay. The lord was staring blankly at the pavement under his face, but he was breathing.
“I hate you,” sobbed Josephine. “I hope this child is his. It ought to be—he and I have been living out here as husband and wife for months.”
Crawford smiled savagely at her and blew her a kiss with his bleeding, garlic-reeking palm.
CHAPTER 23
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
–T. S. Eliot, Preludes
Byron had rolled over, his hand clamped to his bloody throat, and was staring up at the stars. “Well done,” he said hoarsely. He sat up, groaning and bracing himself on his free hand. “That won’t have killed him, you know. He’ll be petrified, and with luck he landed somewhere where the sun will shine tomorrow, but he’s not out of the picture.”
“True,” came a grating voice from the darkness, harsh with inorganic pain.
Byron and Josephine and Crawford all jumped, and the torch in Crawford’s hand swung wildly.
“Take me!” screamed Josephine, managing to prop herself up on one elbow.
“Soon,” said the voice.
Crawford shook his head unhappily, staring at Josephine and dreading exertions to come. He looked back up at the dark hill. “And you rebuked me for having hit her! You tried to kill her!”
“Jesus, Aickman,” said Byron as he struggled to his feet. “Don’t be talking to the thing. We’ve—”
“To kill her,” came the voice, every syllable sounding as if it cost the thing unimaginable pain, “is not an insult.”
“You,” Josephine called into the night, “you want me … dead?” She had managed to get up into a wobbling crouch, with her hands behind her back.
Crawford stared at her. “Of course he wants you dead. Look at the goddamn hole in the pavement where you’d still be lying, smashed like your sis—like a bug, if I hadn’t pulled you away!”
He walked back and crouched by her. “Listen to me,” he said. “Are you listening? Good. He wants you to die and be buried so that you can hatch like an egg and give birth to the seed he’s sown in your blood, the extension of himself that will climb out of your grave. And then after a while you’d give birth to what would once have been our child, but would by this time be one of these creatures.”
He laughed grimly. “Talk about there being no ‘well-at-any-rates'! Our child would be like Shelley or Keats, condemned to nephelism by the circumstances of birth, except that this child would be deprived of ever having any human life. This may be unprecedented, at least since the good old days before Noah.”
Josephine nodded, seeming to have comprehended what he’d said, and he had begun to relax a little, and even to smile, when she suddenly arched powerfully backward, striking her head with a sickening crack against the pavement.
“God!” Crawford squeaked in horror. He lunged forward onto his aching knees and for a moment just cradled her head, his mind as blank as if it had been his own head that had hit the stones; then he laid the torch down carefully and began feeling her skull. Hot blood was rapidly clogging her already matted hair, but she was breathing and her skull was at least not broken in.
He was crying, remembering having given her the same desperate, frightened examination after the two of them had been shot in a street in Rome; then too there had been the powerful reek of garlic and blood, but then it had been because she had kissed him to save him from giving in to the lamia.
He tore a strip from his shirt and tied it around her head so that there would be pressure on the cut. Her hair stuck up ludicrously in all directions.
“She should really be in a hospital,” he was mumbling, more or less to Byron, “she’s bleeding and she hasn’t been eating, you can see that—God knows what that fit was, it was like the convulsions you get if you eat strychnine, but at least it’s worn off for now, apparently—”
“Aickman,” said Byron, swaying unsteadily, “that wasn’t a convulsion.”
“You must not have been looking, man! I’m a physician, but anybody could see—”