Free Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers

so—Maria would never discuss such things, and in fact had never referred to that evening seventeen years ago in a twilit field, when the two of them had given Greek funeral honors to their father’s temporarily buried little black statue.
    Christina had lately written a long poem about a girl who surrenders to supernatural temptation, to her ruin, and her sister who rescues her by exposing herself to the same perils. The poem was called “Goblin Market,” and the book whose proof pages were on the desk was titled Goblin Market and Other Poems.
    Christina had restored the little statue—rendered inert, she had believed then—to its usual perch on her father’s shelf when she had returned from her visit to Maria in the country, and her father had never mentioned the thing again. He had died nine years later, and his last words before he hiccuped into his handkerchief and choked and expired had been Ah Dio, ajuatami Tu! Which meant, roughly, God help me! Their mother, though grieving, had gathered up all the copies in the house of his book, Amor Platonica, and burned them, along with the unpublished notes he’d made on the Kabalistic idea of the transmigration of souls. Nobody, not even Christina’s skeptical brother William, had asked why.
    Christina had dreamed of her father since his death: always in the dream he was sitting across a table from her in a small room lit by candles, talking earnestly; but she couldn’t make out the words in his droning monologue. After a few minutes, she would lean forward and watch his lips intently and concentrate, and he would become visibly alarmed—apparently at the prospect of her comprehending his speech, which she realized he was unable to halt—and he would lean across the table and stick his fingers into her ears, so that she could no longer hear his voice, though she could see his lips still moving helplessly.
    Always she lived with a conviction that at the age of fourteen she had brought a curse on her family by quickening that little statue with her blood.
    Neither Christina nor Maria had married; their brother Gabriel was more stubborn and had married two years ago, at the age of thirty-two—his wife had borne him a dead daughter shortly afterward and was now, God help her, very ill herself. William had been engaged, in spite of Christina’s oblique warnings—and Gabriel’s too, she suspected—but he had canceled the engagement in bewilderment when the young lady insisted that it should be an entirely celibate marriage.
    Amor Platonica indeed, thought Christina now as at last she crouched to pick up the sheet of paper. The young lady had not perhaps been as unreasonable as William had thought.
    The paper was a page from a story she recognized. She had written it out last year and had submitted it to Thackeray’s Cornhill magazine, but after it was rejected, and she reread it, she had found herself sickened by William’s comment that it was the best story she’d ever written—because, though it had been her hand that had held the pen, she was now convinced that she was not the one who had conceived and composed it.
    She had burned it—but since late December she had found her hand writing it out again, in moments when her mind strayed from whatever she’d meant to write.
    Its title was “Folio Q,” and she suspected the Q was meant to indicate the German word quelle, source. It was about a man who didn’t dare look into mirrors, and instead imposed his own face onto the people he loved.
    She suspected that the actual author was her uncle, John Polidori, who had killed himself in 1821, forty-one years ago. It was clear that he had not, after all, been laid to rest when she and Maria had temporarily buried the little statue.
    She glanced at the handwritten page—then stepped to the window for better light, her heart beating more rapidly, for this newest page was a scene that had