The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers

when the hospital administrators decided I was ignorant and unobservant enough to be assigned to Lucas. The more I know about these creatures, these vampires, the more likely it is that I'll be able to get free of the one that oversaw my birth . . . and killed my mother."
    Crawford nodded, but he thought that Keats was lying, and mostly to himself. "The hospital administrators know about this stuff?"
    "Sure . . . though it's hard to say to what extent. A lot of patients vary from the human norm, of course, especially once you get a look inside them, but there's a consistency to the neffy variations. And they're generally less dramatic, too—the kidney and bladder stones just look a little
quartzy
, or the skin turns hard and brittle when they stay out too long in the sun, or they see fine at night but are blinded by daylight. I guess the hospital has decided to try to ignore it—not turn patients away for no reason, which would cause talk, but give the neffy cases to the most inept staff members. I wonder if something like today's adventure has ever happened before—the senior surgeon sure closed the book on it in a hurry."
    "So why am I going to Switzerland?"
    Keats smiled—a little sadly. "The Alps are the biggest part of the neffer dream." He stared out at the river as if for help in explaining. "There's supposed to be a plant in South America that gives people hallucinations if they drink a tea brewed from its leaves—like opium, but in this case everybody sees the same vision. A vast stony city, I understand. Even if a person hasn't been told what to expect, he'll still see the city, same as every other person who's taken the drug."
    He paused to finish his wine, and Crawford waved for a refill. "Thanks. Anyway, being a neffer is similar. You dream about the Alps. A couple of months ago they brought a child from one of the worst Surreyside rookeries to the hospital because he was dying of consumption, and he didn't last long here; but
before
he died, he found a piece of charcoal and drew a beautiful picture of a mountain on the wall by his bed. One of the doctors saw it and wanted to know what book the boy had copied the perfectly detailed picture of Mont Blanc from. Everybody just said they didn't know—it would have been too much trouble to explain to him that the boy had done it out of his head, and that he had never seen a book nor ever been east of the Tower, and that his mother said he'd never drawn anything in his life, not even in mud with a stick."
    "Well, maybe I won't go there. Maybe I'll—I don't know—" He looked up and saw Keats's smile. "Very well, damn it, I have to go there. Maybe the way out of this whole entanglement is there."
    "Sure. Like the exit from the very bottom of Dante's hell—and that just led to Purgatory." Keats got to his feet and put his hand for a moment on Crawford's shoulder. "You may as well wait for me here. I'll make sure I'm not followed, and I'll tell you if I see any official-looking types hanging about. If I haven't come back in an hour, you'd better assume I've been arrested, and just go with what you've got on your back and in your pockets."
     
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
    —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
     
    After Keats had left, Crawford estimated the amount of money in the inner pocket of his coat—he hadn't spent much of Appleton's fifty pounds, and he figured he still had a fairly good stake—probably eighty pounds, certainly seventy. A little reassured, he waved to the girl and pointed at his empty glass.
    He would travel and live cheaply now, and make his money last. In London a person could live, albeit without many new clothes or much meat in the diet, on fifty pounds a year, and things were sure to be less expensive on the continent. And with even a year's leeway he certainly ought to be able to find himself a niche somewhere in the world.
    All he had to do was get across the English Channel, and