He looked back at it—and then stared in horror, for what he saw now was storm-surf and cliffs under a steel-colored sky, and the keel of an overturned boat sliding across the foam-streaked faces of the waves. He knew he would see his brother’s raised arm any moment now, if he didn’t look away….
And there it was! No, the scene had changed—the shifting blue surface was now a field of flowers, and the person waving was a young girl; a moment later he heard her yell, Johnny….
Crawford looked back toward Keats, and saw that he had lowered his hand and was staring at the illusion. The woman followed his gaze and then, with an impatient hiss, clicked her fingernails together, and the street-side wall was restored, all visions banished. The room seemed suddenly very dark.
Crawford guessed that Josephine, and then himself, and then Keats, had been involuntarily projecting the scenes, had for a few moments made helpless use of the lamia’s magical tools while her attention had been distracted by Keats’s near surrender. His summoning of the flask must also have been done by magic borrowed from her.
And the final vision, the vision of Keats’s sister, had undone all her work.
Keats was shaking his head and turning back toward the bedroom. The woman followed him, and Josephine dragged Crawford after them. In the corner Severn was torturing a high-pitched, urgent tune out of the piano, but no one seemed to be listening.
The bedroom window was open to the rain, according to the directions Crawford had tried to give this afternoon, and he wondered if poor Severn had been duped into washing the windowsill and asking the vampire in.
Keats had fallen across his unmade bed, and it really looked as though the exertion of standing up had been too great a strain on his ruined lungs—there was a bubbling undertone to his desperate wheezing now.
The woman hurried to him, holding the book of poetry. “Quickly,” she said, ‘sign the book, save your self.” She took a pen from the top of the dresser and, when he raised a weak hand to fend her off, she jabbed the pen point into his palm. ‘Sign,” she repeated, holding the pen toward him.
Keats took the book from her, but there was bitter disappointment on his face, and he shook his head again. He looked past her to Josephine, who had been his nurse. “Water,” he whispered.
The inhuman woman moved toward Josephine, but Crawford stepped in front of her and coughed garlic fumes in her narrow face; she recoiled, her hair shuddering and contracting away.
Josephine turned to the open window, scraped the palm of her hand along the rain-wet sill and then took a step toward the bed with her hand cupped in front of her.
Keats reached for her.
Suddenly the room was tilting—or seemed to be: when Crawford grabbed at the windowsill to keep his balance he saw that the streets outside were still parallel to the sill and the floor, and for an irrational moment he thought the whole world must be falling over sideways.
Josephine took another step, a very uphill one, but then started to topple backward toward the sitting-room door, which was beginning to seem like part of the floor. Keats, apparently insulated from the gravitational tricks, lunged desperately for her, but was too far away, and too weak to get up and step toward her.
Crawford hiked his good foot up into the window frame and then sprang out across the room in the direction that felt like up; his open hands slammed into the small of Josephine’s back, shoving her into balance, and he fell away backward and hit the wall hard enough to blind him for a moment with the pain in his broken ribs.
Josephine had grabbed one of the posts of Keats’s bed and, holding herself up by it, she extended the hand in which she still cupped some of the water she’d scraped from the windowsill.
“God help me,” Keats whispered, then dipped his finger into the dirty water in Josephine’s palm and scrawled with it on the open page.
The woman retreated still farther when his finger touched the paper, and the room was suddenly level again—and then Josephine was toppling forward and, in catching herself, she pushed her wet fingertips across Keats’s waxy forehead. At that instant the inhuman woman disappeared, with a thin wail that made Crawford’s teeth ache.
The music had stopped, though the air still seemed to ring with it, and they could hear Severn blundering about in confusion in the next room. “John?” Severn called. “Are you all right? I seem to have fallen asleep….” Clearly the cat-woman thing had disappeared from his shoulder.
Keats’s eyes were closed, but his lips were moving; Crawford leaned closer. “Thank you, both of you,” Keats said softly. His eyes opened for a moment and he looked at Crawford. The water that ran down from his forehead found and filled the pain-wrinkles around his eyes and, after a moment, coursed down his cheeks like tears. “I told you once that I might … someday need a favor from a reluctant neff-host.” He sighed, and turned to the wall. “Now please go. And send Severn in—I want to tell him what my … epitaph is to be.”
Severn nodded when Crawford delivered Keats’s message and, though there were tears in his eyes and he started forward at once, he waved toward the couch. “Sit down,” he called softly over his shoulder. “I’ll have Dr. Clark right over to look at you two.”
But when Severn had gone into Keats’s room and closed the door, Crawford took Josephine’s elbow and started toward the door. “We can’t stay,” he whispered clearly to her, hoping she was capable of understanding him. “Anywhere else would be safer—men will be coming here who’ll kill both of us.”
To his relief, she nodded.
He led her down the hall toward the stairs—several people were staring fearfully out past doors open only a crack, and crossed themselves as the two wet, battered figures limped past—and then down the stairwell to the street and the still saintless steps that fretted the Pincian Hill.
He didn’t pause when they left the building, but propelled Josephine quickly out across the square, past the boat-shaped Bernini fountain, to an alley on the far side. He relaxed a little then, but nevertheless made Josephine hurry south along the alley; for when the Austrian forces found that Crawford and she had already got out of the building, they’d certainly search the nearby area.
Luminous gray had begun to infuse the sky to the east, and the long clouds were like wet bandages slowly absorbing blood as the first rays of dawn touched the steeples and towers overhead. Crawford had found a rolling, half-up-on-the-toes gait that eased some of the pain in his left thigh, though he still found himself putting a lot of his weight on the uncomplaining Josephine. Both of them suffered occasional violent fits of shivering, sometimes so bad that they had to stop.
At the Church of San Silvestro he paused to rest and, as he leaned against the stone wall and let his hot lungs slow down, he read a plaque on the wall claiming that the head of John the Baptist was kept somewhere on the premises. It reminded him of Keats’s poem Isabella, and he wondered feverishly what the priests watered the head with, and what they hoped would grow.
“The convent here,” began Josephine suddenly, startling him, “is the post office now. I went there for Keats and Severn yesterday, to see if any of Keats’s friends in England had sent him money. Nobody had.”
“It would have been too late anyway,” Crawford observed. He stared at her. She seemed to be lucid, and he wondered who she thought she was. “How did you wind up here? It wasn’t because of me, was it?”
“No,” she said. “Originally it was for haruspication.” She leaned against the wall next to him and stared into the brightening sky. The white of her eye was blotted with bright red. “A doctor told me that word, when he figured out why I was a nurse. He made me leave. That was in … I don’t know, Fabriano, Firenze…. I’m a nurse everywhere I go now. I need to be.”