Hide Me Among the Graves Read Free

though, so she nodded and tucked it into the pocket of her frock and went back to her sketching.
    But her rabbit began to go wrong under her darting pencil—the hind legs and back seemed broken now, and the creature’s face began to take on a human-like expression that somehow expressed both scorn and pleading—and when she heard her brother Gabriel gasp at the sight of it, she crumpled the paper.
    â€œI think I’ll go up to bed,” she said. She curtsied toward the blinking old men but avoided looking at her father, and she hurried from the parlor to say good night to her mother and to light a candle to guide her up the stairs.
    UNTIL FOUR MONTHS AGO Christina had shared the slant-ceilinged bedroom on the third floor with her older sister, Maria, but Maria had left home on her seventeenth birthday to work as a governess for the children of a family in the country. Maria was the one who always remembered to say her prayers, and Christina, now alone, often forgot.
    Tonight she forgot. She lit a pair of candles that stood on a niche in the chimney bricks, washed her face in the basin and brushed her teeth, but as she climbed into the bed in the corner and blew out the candles and pulled the bed curtain across, her thoughts were of her father’s little statue. It still sat rolled in the handkerchief in her frock, which hung now from a hook by the door.
    The window overlooking Charlotte Street was outside the tent made by the bed curtain, so she sat up and pulled the heavy fabric aside—drafts or no drafts—and stared at the dimly glowing east-facing square in the wall. She was seeing it nearly end on, and couldn’t hope to glimpse stars through the sooty glass, but she was vividly aware of the volume of space outside, all the tangled streets sloping down to the dark moving river, and the vast breathing sea out beyond all the bridges and docks—and then she was dreaming, for under the moon the river and the sea were alive with hundreds, thousands of pale figures waving jointless arms, dark spots intermittently appearing on their distant faces as eyes and mouths opened and closed.
    The window rattled, and she was fully awake again. She and her siblings called that dream the Sea-People Chorus, and she hoped it wouldn’t persist all night, as it sometimes did.
    She preferred it to the visions of the creature she called Mouth Boy, though—an apparition who never appeared to the others, and whose head was flat because it was just an enormous mouth, with no eyes above or behind it. And even as she thought of him she thought she heard his characteristic harsh bellow’s breath all the way up from the pavement below the window; it might have been an exhalation of his that had made the window rattle.
    It was unpleasant to have such dreams when Maria wasn’t in bed beside her! Often Christina and Maria would have had the same nightmare, and been able to hold each other in the darkness and reassure each other that the visions were imaginary.
    This night seemed full of ghosts and monsters impatient to command her helpless attention—and her eyes darted to the faint outline of the door across the room, beside which hung her frock.
    The window rattled again, and her resolve was instant. She bounded out of bed in her nightgown and groped her way to that corner and patted her hung frock till she felt the lump that was the handkerchief, and in a moment she had fumbled it out, shaken the little stone figure free, and hurried back to bed with the cold thing in her fist.
    Blood, she thought—and she bit her finger, chewing beside the nail and ignoring the pain, until she could feel slickness there with her thumb. She rubbed the wet ball of her thumb over the tiny face of the stone figure, feeling the points that were the crude nose and chin of it.
    Her father claimed it had given him a prophetic vision of her mother.
    She tucked it under her pillow and pulled the bed curtain closed