“But I hate you!” Josephine screamed, falling to her knees with the figure of Julia and dragging the blade upward through the abdomen. “You wanted me to worship you, and live only as a … a reflection in one of your mirrors! You loved it when I’d dress up as you and pretend to be you, so that you could … have everybody make fun of me, expose me as horrible little Josephine, and you could drink up the bit of yourself I’d made!” She pulled the dagger out and drove it into one of the struggling figure’s eyes. “I’m like Keats and Shelley—I was born into submission to a vampire!”
The figure had stopped struggling, and was clicking and creaking under her, and moving only as its shrinking limbs were drawn in, and Josephine tugged the dagger free and slowly got to her feet.
Crawford gathered his remaining strength and then made himself stand up and cross to where she stood. He approached her cautiously until she looked at him and he saw recognition in her eyes.
“It wasn’t really Julia,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder.
“I know,” said Josephine, staring down at the little statue on the floor. “But everything I said was true. How … could I not ever have known, until now, that all of that was true?”
Crawford pulled her away, and together they turned and slowly walked over to the glass case against the wall. The figure within it shifted weakly on its ornately embroidered mattress, and seemed to chuckle.
For one moment Crawford thought it must be a terribly old woman, with one hip shoved into a hole in the wall, who had somehow become pregnant—the face was as wrinkled and collapsed as a sun-dried apple, but the belly was tightly distended as if with a huge baby. Then he noticed the wispy beard, and the scar on the abdomen and, finally, tucked away like forgotten schoolboy textbooks in an old man’s basement, the withered male genitalia.
The scar was stretched by the swollen belly, but he recognized it—he had noticed it on the flat stomach of the von Aargau duplicate whose wound he had sewn up in a canal-side café, so long ago.
“Good evening, Werner,” Crawford said unsteadily. “Do you know who this lady is? She’s the nurse who you tried to get me to poison in Rome two years ago.”
“Look at the ceiling,” the appallingly old man said.
Crawford looked up.
And his chest went cold. The ceiling was a checkerboard of heavy, square stone blocks, and Crawford’s very spine cringed with the sudden awareness that there weren’t enough pillars to support it.
“Now look at me.” The old man waved a skeletal hand toward his own left hip, which at first glance had looked as though it had been thrust into a hole in the wall. When Crawford looked more closely, though, peering over the tight expanse of the abdomen, he saw that the pelvis and thigh seemed to have been pared down nearly to the spine, and the body then somehow spliced to the stone.
He and the building are joined at the hip, Crawford thought. It’s like the two women on that little cake that Josephine was supposed to break when I married her sister.
And Crawford thought of a line from Shakespeare, from Macbeth, that Shelley had frequently quoted: like two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art; and for a moment it seemed to him that he, and Josephine, and all the poets, had also consisted of two persons intolerably joined. Werner, and the women portrayed on the oatcake, were simply more obvious examples, and thus a concealment of the subtler forms of it.
“I’m a part of the building,” said Werner. “It’s my continuing vitality alone that prevents the ceiling from falling.” From webs of wrinkles in the ancient skin of the face the two gleaming eyes stared up at him. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Crawford. “If you die, we die.”
The crumpled, papery mouth worked: “Those are the facts of the case. So you can forget your ideas about cutting the statue out of me. And my offer nonetheless still stands: leave now and I will instruct the nephelim to forget all of you forever.”
Crawford was trembling, but he forced a laugh. “I know what their word is worth. Percy Shelley put it to the test recently.”
I could force Josephine to leave, he thought, and then do it, cut it out of him.
Then he remembered her promise to drown herself if she were not allowed to accompany him in this. He knew he would not be able to force her to leave.
For a moment he considered taking Werner’s offer—but he knew Josephine would not ever agree to that either.
Perhaps Werner was bluffing about the ceiling?
Crawford glanced up, and then shudderingly looked down again. No, he was not bluffing.
He was snapping his fingers, and he avoided looking at either Werner or Josephine.
And you don’t have infinite time, he told himself. You’ve got to do something.
He stared down into the glass case at the ancient scar that stretched across von Aargau’s distended belly, and then very slowly he turned to Josephine. “You’ve been a nurse for how many years?” “Six,” she whispered.
“How many times do you think you’ve—” He had to pause and take a deeper breath. “How many times do you think you’ve assisted at a caesarian birth?”
Werner was saying something quickly, but Josephine’s voice overrode his. “Say, six times.”
“Good—because you’re about to do it again.”
Crawford climbed into the glass case and, ignoring Werner’s bony hands plucking weakly at his trousers, began carefully breaking the glass walls outward with the butt of his pistol—he and Josephine would need room to work.
Werner’s frail shouting stopped consisting of words when Crawford, holding the dagger wrapped in cloth so as to be able to grip it near the point, pinched up a tight fold of flesh and made the first incision.
And though Werner’s struggling became even more violent then, Josephine had tied him down well, and was able to hold him still with one arm and use the other hand to blot up the flowing blood with a piece of cloth soaked in brandy from Crawford’s flask. Every few seconds she held the flask to the old man’s lips—after the first cut he had stopped refusing it.
Exhaustion was beginning to darken Crawford’s vision, and it took a powerful effort of will to keep his hand from trembling or cutting too deeply. He kept forgetting that he was not in a hospital delivering a baby, and more than once he irritably asked Josephine for a bistoury or probe-scissors.
He forced himself to remember the series of drawings he had seen in The Menotti Miscellany, the drawings that had been miscatalogued as illustrations of a caesarian section but had actually been a record of the operation in which the statue had been inserted into Werner. He remembered where the incisions had originally been made in the membrana adiposa and the peritoneum, and he tried to cut in the same places.
His fingers seemed to remember their old skill, and moved with increasing deftness, and in only a few minutes he was able to press aside the split skin and muscle layers and see the statue.
It had grown during its centuries inside Werner, and was now about the size of a two-year-old child, but he recognized it from the drawing in the ancient manuscript. Like a real baby it was curled up head-downward, its feet and hands up around its cheek, and Crawford had to remind himself that this form was stone, and that he wouldn’t be cutting an umbilical cord. He carefully worked his hand in behind the slippery head.