The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers

marriage.
    Julia had come up beside him and touched his shoulder. He nodded to his friends, then turned and took her arm and began leading her toward the front door.
     
    The moon ducked in and out of muscular-looking clouds overhead as the landau rattled along the shore road, and a wind had sprung up that nearly drowned out the distant respiration of the waves. Crawford pulled the fur robe more tightly around Julia and himself, thankful that the carriage roof had been put up; and he was charitably hoping, as he watched the steam of his breath plume away, that the driver had had a lot of old Mr. Carmody's brandy before they'd left.
    The wildness of the night seemed to have got into the horses, for they were nearly galloping in the harnesses, their ears laid back and sparks flying from their hooves even though the road wasn't particularly flinty—the carriage arrowed through the luckily empty streets of St. Leonards only about ten minutes after leaving Bexhill-on-Sea, and shortly after that Crawford could see the lights and buildings of Hastings ahead, and he heard the driver swearing at the horses as he worked at reining them in.
    The carriage finally slowed to a stop in front of the Keller Inn, and Crawford helped Julia step down onto pavement that seemed, after the wild ride, to be rocking like the deck of a ship.
    They were expected, and several young men in the inn's livery sprinted out of the building to haul the luggage down from the boot. Crawford tried to pay for the ride, but was told that Appleton had covered it, and so he made do with tipping the driver lavishly before the man got back up onto the seat to take the carriage back to Appleton's house in London.
    Then, suddenly both impatient and self-conscious, Crawford took Julia's elbow and followed the baggage-laden servants into the building. Several minutes later an amber glow of lamplight flared to define an upstairs window, and presently it went out.
     
    Morning sunlight, fragmented by the warped glass of the windowpane, was spattered and streaked like a frozen fountain across the wall when Crawford was awakened by the maid's knock. He was stiff and feverish, though he hadn't had an appreciable amount to drink the night before, and for the first few minutes, while he was facing the sunny wall, he thought he was still in Warnham, and that it was tonight that he was supposed to get married.
    Brown stains on the quilt in front of his eyes seemed to confirm it. That's right, he thought blurrily, I went out barefoot into the muddy yard last night . . . and had some kind of drink-spawned hallucination, and failed to find the wedding ring. I'd better go look for it again this morning. Vaguely he wondered what the mud had consisted of—there was certainly a strange smell in the room, like the heavy odors of an operating theater.
    And why were these bluish quartz crystals lying on the sheet? There must have been half a dozen of them, each as big as a sparrow's egg. He could understand having picked them up—they were eye-catching little pebbles, knobby but bright with an amethystine glitter—but why scatter them across the bed?
    The maid knocked again. With a groan he rolled over—
    —And then he screamed and convulsed right out of the bed and onto the floor, and he crawled backward across the polished wood, piling up carpets at his back, until the wall stopped him, and he was still screaming with every quick breath.
    The brown stains had not been mud.
    His lungs were heaving inside his ribs with the stress of his inhuman shrieking, but his mind was stopped, as static as a smashed clock; and though his eyes were clenched tightly shut now, all he could see was bones jutting terribly white from torn and crushed flesh, and blood everywhere. He wasn't Michael Crawford now, nor even a human—for an endless minute he was nothing but a crystallized knot of horror and profound denial.
    He consisted of an impulse to stop existing—but the very fact of breathing linked