He saw that she was barefoot, and that there was blood on the floorboards too.
“Josephine,” he said unsteadily, “I love you. Don’t let Julia, your ghost of Julia, take your body, not ever again.”
“I—” For several seconds she tried to speak, then just shifted around toward the bow and shook her head. “I’ll try not to.”
That night was Midsummer’s Eve, and the two of them stayed up later than everyone else, though they could hear Ed Williams talking quietly, presumably to his wife, in his room.
Only one lamp burned, the lamp Shelley insisted burn all night, and Crawford and Josephine had finished the bottle of wine left over from dinner and were slowly working on another one that he had opened after that. They had talked for more than an hour, rarely even brushing any important topics, when, simultaneously, the latest pause in the conversation became the end of it and Crawford noticed that they had finished the wine.
He stood up and held his hand out to her. “Let’s go to bed.”
They went into their room and closed the door and undressed, and then in the darkness—for he had pulled the curtains across their window—they made long, slow love, stopping short of climax again and again until finally it was unstoppably upon them.
After a while Crawford rolled off of her and lay beside her, feeling her hot, dewy flank against his side; he opened his mouth to tell her softly that he loved her—
—And a shriek from another room interrupted him and sent him bounding out of bed.
For lack of anything else he pulled on Shelley’s cut-off trousers, then opened the door and stepped into the dining room; he could hear Josephine behind him struggling into clothes.
The door to the Shelleys’ room was open, and the tall, thin figure of Shelley came out quickly but without any sound. His eyes were glowing like a cat’s in the lamplight and, before pulling the drapes aside and disappearing onto the terrace outside, he crossed to Crawford and kissed him lightly on the lips. Crawford saw teeth glint in the open mouth, but they didn’t touch him.
Then Shelley came out of his room again, and Crawford realized that this was the real one—and when he realized who the first figure must have been, his chest went hollow and cold and he had half turned toward the terrace door before he remembered Josephine.
He made himself turn his back on the terrace and face Shelley.
CHAPTER 15
But the worm shall revive thee with kisses,
Thou shalt change and transmute as a god
As the rod to a serpent that hisses,
As the serpent again to a rod.
Thy life shall not cease though thou doff it;
Thou shalt live until evil be slain,
And good shall die first, said thy prophet,
Our Lady of Pain.
—A. C. Swinburne, Dolores
“Where did it go?” Shelley demanded.
Not trusting himself to speak yet, Crawford simply pointed to the drapes.
Shelley collapsed against the wall and rubbed his eyes. “It was trying to strangle her—strangle Mary.” He held up his hands, which were scratched and bloody. “I had to tear its hands away from Mary’s neck.”
The Williamses and Josephine were in the dining room now, and Shelley had pulled the drapes aside and, crouching, was licking his finger, rubbing it along the floor by the windows, then moving and licking it again. When he had hunched and licked his way down the whole length of the windows he looked up.
“There’s no salt nor garlic here,” he said, staring straight at Edward Williams.
Williams flinched, then mumbled, “Is that what that was? The smell—I just thought I’d wash them better—” He had buttoned up the collar of his nightshirt, but Crawford could see a spot of blood staining the fabric at his neck.
Shelley’s lips were a straight white line. “All of you go back to bed,” he said, “except you, Aickman—we’ve got to talk.”
“Josephine can hear it,” Crawford said.
Shelley blinked. “I thought her name was …? But very well, let her stay. Bed for the rest of you.”
Shelley was twisting a corkscrew into a fresh wine bottle when the Williamses closed their door, and he poured wine into the only lately abandoned glasses that Crawford and Josephine held out.
“We can’t leave tomorrow,” Shelley said quietly.
Crawford was glad that the person at his side was no longer Julia. “What are you talking about?” he whispered. “This makes it more urgent than ever that we leave! Did you see Ed’s neck? Will you wait until your last child is dead? I don’t—”
“Let him speak, Michael,” interrupted Josephine.
“She’s particularly accessible here,” Shelley went on, “and what I have in mind—the only thing left for me to try—requires that she be accessible.”
“What is it?” asked Crawford.
“You should know,” Shelley told him with hollow gaiety. “It was your idea.” When Crawford still stared blankly at him, Shelley added, with some impatience, “That I drown myself.”
Crawford flinched. “I—I wasn’t serious. I was just—”
“I know. Angry at the death of that unborn child. But you were right, it is the only way to save Percy Florence and Mary.” He smiled now—maliciously, Crawford thought. “But you’ll have to do something too. And I wonder if you won’t find it harder than my own task.”
The next day the sun burned more hotly than ever in the empty cobalt sky, and when Captain Roberts returned from a run up the coast for supplies—largely more wine—he reported that the narrow streets of Lerici were crowded with religious processions imploring rain.
That night was the Feast of St. John, and after sunset the people of San Terenzo came dancing down the coastline through the surf, singing holy songs and waving torches; Shelley stood at the rail of the terrace, even after night had fallen and the songs had degenerated into drunken, savage chanting and the figures in the surf had begun to throw rocks at the Casa Magni.
Finally a torch was flung at Shelley, and missed only because Crawford pulled him out of the way, and Shelley dazedly allowed himself to be led back inside. The noise continued until only shortly before dawn, when the fishermen went reeling and singing back to their boats and nets.
The shouting and the oppressive heat had kept anyone from getting any real rest, and when Crawford went downstairs to watch the fisher-folk go lurching and splashing home he saw the dim silhouette of Mary Shelley standing by the seawall and talking to someone up on the wooded slope beyond it.
He hurried toward her, thinking that one of the drunken fishermen might be bothering her, but he paused when he heard her laugh softly.
“John, you know I’m married,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly go with you. But thank you for the … attention.”
She turned back toward the beach and Crawford saw that she was holding a dark rose up to her chin, so that its petals seemed to be a part of the bruising that mottled her throat. He looked past her at the shadowy slope, but could see nothing there—though he could hear a slithering rustle receding up through the trees. Crawford walked forward, sliding his feet in the sand so that she’d hear him approaching and not be startled when he spoke. “That was Polidori?” he asked.