“It was,” said Byron, his voice weak but very clear, “a suicide attempt. She learned that the Polidori-thing wants her dead, and so she tried to comply. It’s a good thing you had her tied up—otherwise we’d be out in the sea right now trying to catch her.”
Crawford laid her head down gently. “… Oh.” He stood up, absently grateful for the cold wind in his sweat-drenched hair. “I suppose it could … I suppose that was it. Yes.”
Byron leaned, then caught himself with a quick forward step and sat down hastily. “I, however,” he whispered, “may shortly be able to show you a genuine convulsion.” Both his hands were palm down on the ground, and Crawford could see the blood coursing steadily down his neck.
Crawford shambled over to him, sat down and, hopelessly, lifted one of Byron’s hands and put his fingers on the man’s wrist. The pulse was fast and thready, and the skin was hot. The characteristic fever of a newly bit vampire victim was already setting in, building on the fever Byron had already had.
Crawford dropped the hand and sat back, at last recognizing the huge, unalterable fact that had changed the evening, made their efforts and heroics pointless.
“You can’t physically make it to Venice, can you?” he asked, his voice flat with the effort of concealing the bitter resentment he felt; he would never know if Byron had secretly wanted the evening to end this way, but he vividly remembered the two opportunities Byron had had to shoot the vampire—before its first metamorphosis, and in the instant when it was again a man rushing down the hill at them—before it could bite him. And Crawford knew Byron was a good enough marksman to have made either shot. “Over the Apennines, and down the Po Valley … especially starting tonight—which,” he added with a bleak look up at the hillside, “I’m afraid we would have to do.”
All for nothing, he thought. My shredded hand, Josephine’s cracked head.
Byron put his hand back on his throat and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m nearly certain I’ll die if I try it now.” He glanced across at Josephine’s sprawled form, and sighed. Then he looked back at Crawford, and all of the usual bluster was gone from his eyes. “But let’s put it to the test.”
Crawford blinked at him, a little ashamed now of his earlier suspicions, but still angry. “No. Thank you, but no.” He tried to think. “Maybe I could do it without you,” he said, knowing even as he spoke that it wasn’t true.
“No, you couldn’t. You don’t know … nearly enough about the eye, and the Graiae. For one thing, the eye isn’t usually free to jump—it was jumping in 1818 because Shelley was right there when they woke up, but ordinarily it stays with one of the columns. There are a number of chants that will free it up, but you have to be able to gauge a number of factors to know which chant will work on the night you’re there. I studied these things at an Armenian monastery there for months, but I’m not even sure I could do it.”
After a moment Crawford nodded reluctantly. He knew Byron was right.
There was a word Crawford was trying to think of, something with the dryness of a legal term, but which had come to have a physically unpleasant meaning for him … a taste of iron and vinegar.
Then he had it. “Proxy,” he said, his voice hollow with hope and nausea.
“Proxy?”
“You can be there—enough to advise me, and to draw the attention of Lord Grey and then lose him—and still be here. How’s your neck bleeding?”
“Steadily, thank you.” Some of the old irritability was seeping back into Byron’s voice. “Aren’t you supposed to know about bandages and such things?”
“I’ll put a bandage on it in a moment. First, give me your jar of garlic.”
Byron dug it out and handed it to him, and Crawford opened it and with his fingers dug out as much of the minced garlic as he could and dropped the stuff onto the pavement. Then he held the jar against the skin of Byron’s neck. “I just need a bit of your blood.”
For a moment Byron looked as if he would resist—then he just nodded weakly and lifted his chin and turned away so that Crawford could hold the jar to the bite.
When the jar was half full, Crawford shut it and set about bandaging Byron’s neck.
“When I drink this blood,” he began.
“Drink it?” Byron exclaimed. “You spent too much time in that nefando den!”
“Just enough time, actually. I remember thinking that when those men drank my blood I was able to look out of their eyes, see myself on that cross, if only dimly and fitfully, from the other side of the room. And when I drank Shelley’s blood—”
Byron gagged. “You really are a neffer, Aickman.”
“When I drank Shelley’s blood,” Crawford went on steadily, “I was able to see and feel everything he did, and I was even able to talk to him, converse with him.”
Byron was interested in spite of himself. “Really? I wonder if something similar may be the original basis for the Christian Eucharist.”
Crawford rolled his eyes impatiently. “Conceivably. So when I drink this, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to be you, to some extent, and you be me. So you’ll know when I’ve got there, and am ready to start. Now listen, I’ll spill what I don’t drink, so Lord Grey will come rushing to your rescue in Venice as surely as my lamia rushed to where I’d spilled Shelley’s and my blood. The thing is, and do pay attention to this, you must not be visible to him anywhere else when I do it, or he won’t be fooled. Shelley made himself invisible to his half sister by being out in the boat—seawater, right? So you have Fletcher or Trelawny or somebody bring a tub of seawater into your room, and you make sure you’re immersed in it when I spill your blood in Venice.”
They set out for the road above the house, where Trelawny had left the carriage.
Byron held the torch and Crawford half carried, half dragged the unconscious Josephine, and they managed to work their way to the back of the house in only a few minutes.
The upward sloping path behind the house was more difficult; Byron couldn’t climb more than a few feet before needing to sit down and breathe deeply for a while, and Crawford found, to his confused horror, that the only way he could get Josephine up the slope was to tie a fresh length of the rope around her ankles and loop it around a higher trunk and then lean into the free end, so that his own weight dragged her up the hill backward; though it delayed them still further, he couldn’t help pausing frequently to go to her and pull her skirt back up over her knees.
His heart was pounding alarmingly, and not just from the physical effort; he kept imagining that he heard Polidori whispering over the crash of the surf and the rustle of the branches and the scuffing and slithering and panting of his own progress, and during one of the pauses for rest he was sure he heard a soft chuckling from the darkness beyond the torch’s frail light.
At last he had got Josephine up to the road, and had rolled, hiked and folded her into the carriage. Byron followed her inside and Crawford climbed slowly up to the driver’s bench with the torch, which he wedged into a bracket in the luggage rail. The two horses harnessed to the carriage seemed impatient to be gone.
The clouds had broken up, and the moonlight was bright enough so that he was able to drive at a fairly good speed; within minutes they had reached the streets and overhanging buildings of Lerici, and he reined in the horses in front of a house a few hundred feet from the inn where Byron’s party was staying.
Crawford climbed down and opened the door, and Byron got out, as carefully as someone’s great-grandfather. Crawford couldn’t help remembering the vital young man he’d first met in a Geneva street in 1816.