Hide Me Among the Graves Read Online Free Page A

tricks.”
    â€œCan we at least give him some sort of pagan burial, so he might dissipate into the dirt and the grass? Then tomorrow I could dig him—it—up again, once the spirit was gone, and take the emptied statue back to Papa.”
    â€œChristina, this is a job for a priest, not two girls! A Catholic priest, really—they’re more familiar with devils.”
    â€œI won’t send him to Hell. I’ll let him drain me to a husk, sooner.” She shuddered and hugged herself with her thin arms. “I’m glad he didn’t do this to Papa. But, Maria, why didn’t he do this to Papa, who found him and woke him?”
    â€œPapa married into the Polidori family; he’s not a blood relation. You are. Do you need help getting down?”
    After a moment of puzzlement, Christina shook her head and pulled her right foot free of the stirrup, and when she swung her leg over the horse’s back, Maria caught her by the waist and steadied her to the ground.
    â€œYou don’t weigh anything,” said Maria, brushing her sister’s skirt out straight.
    Christina took a hasty step to catch her balance and said, breathlessly, “Help me down—from this precipice!—Maria.”
    For several seconds neither girl spoke, and Christina’s panting gradually subsided.
    â€œCan he hear us?” asked Maria finally. “Now?”
    â€œNo—he’s aware of me—I can feel his attention like spiderwebs—but—” Christina looked up at the fading blue sky and then looked around nervously at the chapel and the grassy hills. “We’d see him, if he could hear us. Why?”
    â€œI can think of a couple of things we might try,” said Maria gruffly. “One, out of Papa’s old Hebrew books, would surely damn our souls.”
    Out of consideration for her sister, Christina asked, “What’s the other?”
    â€œWell—Mama was a Polidori. She said the family, Grandpa and all of them, liked to think they were descended from Polydorus, in the Iliad and the Aeneid .”
    â€œThat’s right.” Christina crouched beside her horse’s front legs, for she still felt dizzy. “You wanted to call Grandpa’s house in Park Village ‘Myrtle Cottage’ because of something to do with Polydorus.”
    Maria nodded and cast a long look at the churchyard gate, and at the dozen headstones standing up in the shadowed grass beyond it, then sighed and led her horse away, across the road to a ditch and a low fieldstone wall. Beyond the wall a wide field sloped up to a hedge, still brushed with gold sunlight, on the crest of the hill.
    Christina straightened up and followed, scuffing her shoes in the dust as she pulled her own horse clopping along after her.
    â€œWhat did Polydorus do, again?”
    â€œDie, mainly,” said Maria over her shoulder. “In the Aeneid they find his body, his unrestful murdered body, tangled up in the roots of a myrtle bush on the island of Thrace, and they give it proper honors and—and it’s implied that the ghost lies quiet after that.”
    â€œCan we give— him —those ‘proper honors’?”
    Maria muttered some Latin hexameters under her breath, then said, “Milk and blood, and dirt piled on him. And black fillets, like hair ribbons—and the Trojan women let down their hair in grief.”
    Christina was leaning forward to rest her elbows on the waist-high stone wall and looking away, up the hill. The stone was still warm, though the breeze was now uncomfortably chilly.
    â€œThe question is,” Maria went on, “will he recognize it as a fitting au revoir for a Polidori? Not just fitting, in fact, but compelling?”
    Christina said, “ I don’t know,” in a weary exhalation. “Can you ride back and get milk? And black ribbons?”
    â€œSurely. Er … what will we do for blood?”
    â€œHe’s had