Of course they’d kill Josephine … damn her.
“That’s the one place we can’t go,” he told her, trying to speak clearly in spite of the powerful dizziness that made the whole street seem to spin. “The people who shot us just now—more of them will be there. They’d kill … us.”
She stood up. “Stay or come along,” she said. “This is going there.”
Crawford’s hands were shaking as if he’d been drinking coffee all day. He was only breathing every five seconds or so, in great, shuddering sighs, and a cold, sweaty nausea was beginning to crawl up his throat from his stomach. He’d seen these symptoms in wounded sailors aboard ships, and he knew he was in danger of “freezing up"—going into a state in which all the body’s functions just slowed down and stopped.
He tried to think clearly. He could knock on a door in this street, and take his chances with whatever sort of doctor was summoned, or he could walk the near mile to Keats’s place with some assurance of getting the best possible care.
The rain had stopped, and the night didn’t seem to be as cold as it had been.
“Let me put a tourniquet on this first,” he said.
Though Crawford sweated and swore and sobbed, and leaned ever more heavily on the fortunately mechanical Josephine, and had to sit down many times to loosen and retie the tourniquet, and toward the end started begging forgiveness from the ghosts that seemed to be walking with him, the devastated pair of them eventually came dragging and lurching into the Piazza di Spagna.
Wild piano music was playing somewhere nearby, and Crawford blinked around, trying to figure out where it was coming from and what the tormentingly familiar melody was. After a moment he realized that he had heard it only in certain unrestful adolescent dreams.
There didn’t seem to be anyone in the square—the saints on the steps had of course all left many hours ago, at dusk, and if any of von Aargau’s men were here, they were apparently inside the building that was Number 26–but the square flickered with a diffuse white light, and when Crawford forced his eyes to focus he saw that the second floor of the building was alive with the brushlike illumination of St. Elmo’s Fire.
Corbie’s Aunt is paying Keats a visit, he thought blurrily—and then he noticed the two figures that stood outside the door. Somehow in the weird light he couldn’t tell if they were robed or naked.
One was male and the other, which he recognized instantly even after four years, was female. He sighed profoundly, and knew that even if he had had his flask with him, he wouldn’t have had the strength to resist, not now, not injured and exhausted like this.
He hoisted himself away from Josephine’s shoulder and began limping forward. The music strengthened and jumped up into a higher octave.
Josephine started forward too, and though she was weaving drunkenly he fleetingly got the impression that she was somebody again. The music was in cut-time now, and wilder, like a horse galloping down a steep road at night.
“Run,” he whispered harshly to Josephine, even though he had little breath to spare. “You’ll die here. This has … nothing … to do with you.”
He looked over at her, and saw on her face the same hungrily despairing expression he knew was on his own. “He has to do with me,” she said. Her voice was a defeated monotone, but he still thought she had recovered from her mechanical mode.
The woman at the doorway kept her brightly reptilian eyes on Crawford as he approached, and when at last he paused, a few yards in front of her, she smiled, baring inhuman teeth.
“You lost me in the Alps,” she hissed. “Invite me back now and I’ll heal you entirely, and you can forget everything.”
She held out to him a hand—it was slightly more like a jewelled bird-claw than like a woman’s hand, but he remembered it sliding languorously over his naked body four years ago, and his heart was pounding with the desire to take it. The music was doing arabesques around his rapid heartbeat now, and he thought he could almost remember the steps of a dance so ancient and wild that trees and rivers and storms took part in it.
A moment later Josephine rocked to a halt beside him, and the male figure said to her, “You lost me in the Alps. Invite me back now and I’ll fulfill you, and you can forget everything.”
The parallel statements had fit into the music like sections of gold thread in a vivid tapestry, and almost seemed to be lyrics, implying more to come.
Tears were running down Crawford’s face—he didn’t see how he could be expected to resist her any longer. For four years now he had ignored his nocturnal urges when he could, and had drunk himself insensible when he could not, and had lived with the memories that she could rid him of, and had not once given in to the temptation to call her—but now, surely, he could do it, could surrender his despised identity and just become an extension of her.
Faintly over the music he thought he caught an echo of harsh coughing; and then, “Not yet,” grated Josephine beside him. “Upstairs—free Keats to die.”
Crawford had vaguely assumed that she was talking to herself, but when he raised his arms toward the faintly luminous female figure in front of him, Josephine struck them down.
The music, which had been rising, fell off a little.
He blinked at her impatiently. “We do? Why?”
She waved her hands helplessly. “Because … because of the sister,” she said. She seemed to have trouble talking, but then words came in a rush. “We can’t let the sister die, not again. We’ve got to buy ourselves out of debt. Then we can go to hell.”
I never had a sister, he thought—and then, for the first time in quite a while, he remembered the boat foundering in the Moray Firth, and remembered his brother’s arm waving, for a while, in the savage water.
He stepped back, and though he was talking to Josephine his eyes were on the lips and the flickeringly lit eyes of the woman in front of him. “But they’re dead!” he said loudly. “What can we do about it now, except forget it?”
“Nothing,” the woman in front of him said. “Come to me.” Her bare breasts were nacreous white, and seemed to be very finely scaled, and he knew how they would feel under his hands, or against his bare chest. The music surged, booming through the square and away up the steps to ring in the dark forest beyond the church.
“Save this one,” interrupted Josephine, and again he wondered if she was talking to herself, for she was talking almost too softly to be heard. “Do what’s left.”
“I … can’t.” Crawford took a step forward, reaching for the inhuman woman and opening his mouth to pronounce, gratefully, the long-resisted invitation—he could feel the appropriate point in the music approaching.
“Wait!” screamed Josephine, so harshly that he actually slowed for a moment to glance back at her.
She darted a hand to her face and seemed to dig and pull, and a moment later he was startled to see that she had gouged out her false eye. She popped it into her mouth and bit down hard, and even through the muffling of her cheeks he heard glass crunch.
Then Josephine had pulled him back and locked her arms around him and was kissing him furiously, her dry lips opening and leading his tongue into a mouth that was full of blood and glass splinters and—startlingly—crushed garlic.
The piano screamed.
And all of Crawford’s years-pent-up eroticism battered at him now in a sudden, hot flood—he responded passionately, grabbing the blood-thick hair at the back of her head with one hand so that he could crush her face into his, and pulling her pelvis hard against him with the other. The pistol ball under her scalp was hot against his fingers, and he could feel the one in his thigh radiating heat.