But though some power was helping him to see her as a temporary bit of noxious growth—some kind of mushroom that would appear fat on a lawn in the morning and be burst and spoiled by dusk—something in his mind, something more forceful, was making him see her in different contexts: he saw her helpless at sea, while he looked on without acting; trapped in a burning building while he drank nearby; crushed in a bed in which he slept, and went on sleeping.
And then he remembered her pulling Byron and himself back from the abyss on the peak of the Wengern, and kissing him with a mouth full of glass and garlic in a Roman street, and pulling him out of the sea and massaging his leg with tortured hands, and he remembered the beach on which they had first made love, the day of Mary’s miscarriage.
And, unhappily, he put the vial back into his pocket.
At a little after one in the afternoon the boat hove to and lowered its sails, and Crawford and Josephine climbed over the gunwale and waded to shore, a few hundred yards south of the Casa Magni; the trip had only taken about five hours.
The sun glared bright as static lightning in the burned purple sky.
“She’ll be weak,” Crawford told Josephine harshly as he dragged a stick through the hot white sand, drawing a wide pentagram, “since it’s daytime. She’ll come, though, because she’ll imagine that Shelley and I are in danger, and she—” His throat narrowed, and he had to stop before going on. “—she loves us.” He had shed his jacket, but still the sweat ran down his face and soaked his shirt.
Josephine didn’t say anything. She was standing at the top of the beach slope, just in front of the trees, and it occurred to Crawford that the spot where they had first made love must be somewhere nearby. He couldn’t be bothered now to try to figure out where it had been.
Outside the pentagram he put down the iron case Shelley had given him, and he crouched to open it. For a moment the reek of garlic overpowered the sea smell, and even after the breeze had taken the first redolent puff away, the smell swirled back and forth in the warm air like strands of seaweed in a tide pool.
He opened a little jar and turned to the pentagram and shook a mixture of wood shavings, shredded silver and chopped garlic into four of the five shallow grooves, leaving empty the groove that faced the sea. He set the jar down, still open, in the sand nearby. At last he straightened and stared out westward across the glittering blue Gulf toward the peaks of Portovenere.
He knew that he was about to change his world forever, rob it of all its glamour and adventurous expectancy and what Shelley had once in a poem called “the tempestuous loveliness of terror.”
Goodbye, he thought.
“Come,” he called softly.
He bit his finger savagely and held it over the pentagram so that the quick drops of blood fell onto the sand within it; then he took the vial out of his pocket and uncorked it and poured half of the contents onto the spatters of his own blood. There was still an inch or so of red fluid in the glass container, and he looked hopelessly at it for several seconds while he tried to summon the nerve to do what came next.
“Screw your courage to the sticking point,” he whispered to himself, and then drank the blood and tossed the empty vial into the close sea.
And then he was in two places at once. He was still on the beach and aware of the pentagram and Josephine and the hot sand under his boots, but he was also on the shifting deck of the Don Juan, back in the boat-crowded Livorno harbor.
“He’s there,” he heard himself say in Shelley’s voice to the two other men on the boat with him. “Cast off.”
A mirage was forming way out over Portovenere, and though there was no wind to deface the pentagram or stir Josephine’s skirt, Crawford felt something massive rushing toward them across the miles of ocean.
Josephine gasped, and when he impatiently glanced at her he saw that she had clapped her hand over her glass eye. “I saw her,” she said, her voice husky with fear. “She’s coming here.”
“To die,” Crawford said.
He felt the deck of Shelley’s boat shift under his feet and he had to resist the impulse to roll with it. “So is Shelley,” he said, and he spoke loudly, because des Loge’s harsh laughter on the deck of the Don Juan was ringing in his ears. Through Shelley’s eyes he saw the low, dark clouds moving in toward Livorno from the southwest, and distantly he felt too Shelley’s rigidly suppressed horror at what was soon to happen.
Then Crawford’s attention was entirely on what his own eyes were seeing, for now she was there on the beach, standing naked in the pentagram.
She was blinking in the glare of the sun on the white sand, and before he could look at her closely he quickly crouched to pour the wood-and-sand-and-garlic along the last line, closing the geometrical figure and trapping her inside.
When it was done he stood back and then let himself look at her.
She was pearly white and smooth, and the sight of her mouth and breasts and long legs made the breath stop in his throat; and though he could see that the sunlight was hurting her terribly, her weirdly metallic eyes were looking at him with love and, already, forgiveness.
“Where is my brother?” she asked. Her voice was like a melody played on a silver violin. “Why have you called me and imprisoned me?”
Crawford made himself look away from her, and he saw the sand shifting in waves away from the pentagram. “Shelley is sailing this way,” he said tensely. “There’s a storm …”
He heard her bare feet shift in the sand as she turned to look south. She whispered a sound that was half sigh and half sob, and he knew she was dreading the tortures of the long flight south to save Shelley. “You don’t want him to die,” she said. “Release me so that I can save him.”
“No,” Crawford said, trying to sound resolute. “This is his plan. He wants me to do this.”
The woman turned back toward him, and he found himself helplessly meeting her inhuman gaze. “Do you want him to die?”
“I won’t stop him.”
“Did he tell you,” she asked him, “that it will kill me too?”
Her eyes seemed prodigiously deep, and were as dark as a cool moonless night on a Mediterranean island. “Yes,” he whispered.
“Do you want me to die?”
He felt Josephine’s hot hand take his; he wanted to shake it off irritably, but he forced himself to clasp it, even though he knew that he was clasping death—his own soon enough, and Shelley’s and the lamia’s today. He tried to think about Percy Florence Shelley, and Mary, and the Williams children, and Josephine.
“Yes,” he answered the woman, hoping it would all be over before his fragile resolve crumbled. He looked away from her and saw, through Shelley’s tears, the thick skirt of rainy haze that hung under the dark clouds ahead of the Don Juan’s leaping bow.
He sat down, for the rocking of the distant deck was making him weave on the sand—but the sand was moving too. The sand-waves moving away from the pentagram were higher now, though they seemed powerless to change the pentagram itself; and humped shapes, apparently made of sand, were beginning to rise up around the three human forms in a semicircle that was open on the seaward side. Rocks in the wooded slope cracked as if flexing themselves.