Ancient Appetites (The Wildenstern Saga Book 1)

by Oisin McGann

  Tired and dispirited, he eventually found himself near Gerald’s quarters. Nate knew what he needed to do to ease his mind and he decided to try and convince his cousin to come along.

  Gerald was standing in his laboratory, in the light of the tall windows. He was wearing an apron over his clothes and was gazing up at the overcast sky, lost in thought. On the tables around him were the remains of the corpses disinterred by the explosion. They were in various states of decomposition. Even the skeletons varied in age, some a stark yellow-white, others turning a dirty brown. Nate wrinkled his nose at the smell of old decay.

  Gerald did not notice him until he was halfway across the room.

  “Welcome to my mortuary,” he said, turning round and blinking as if waking from a sleep.

  “Enjoying the work?” Nate asked him.

  “I am, actually,” his cousin replied, gesturing towards the nearest table. “I was a bit irritated at having to put aside my work on engimal behavior, but this is pretty fascinating stuff. Fitting the skeletons back together was easy, where the bones are intact. But piecing together the fragmented bones is proving a little more difficult. A bit like a jigsaw in three dimensions. And I’m not sure if you’re supposed to use glue on mortal remains or not.”

  “Probably sacrilege,” Nate commented. “Still, you always did like puzzles.”

  “Mm.” Gerald nodded. “But there’s an even bigger puzzle. All the graves in this cemetery have been recorded and marked down on a map. The family has always been diligent about its record-keeping—it’s one of the reasons we’re so rich. And as far back as records on this graveyard go, we can account for all the people buried here. The explosion unearthed the graves of eighteen people. We know this for certain.”

  “So?” Nate asked.

  “So why,” Gerald continued, “do we have twenty-two bodies?”

  Nate shrugged.

  “The records must be wrong, or someone chucked an extra few bodies into the graves without telling anybody. That’s no great mystery.”

  “I don’t think so,” Gerald said, shaking his head. “Have a gander at this.”

  He walked down to the end of the room, where two long tables were draped in sheets. Lifting off the covers, he folded them carefully and laid them aside. Stretched out on the tables were four cadavers. Nathaniel leaned over, studying each one.

  They were different from the rest of the corpses. The others were little more than skeletons, if that. These four were remarkably intact. Each one was caked in mud, but still had flesh on its bones. The skin was dark brown, tough and wrinkled like old leather, the teeth bared as if in a grimace. The bodies had a flattened appearance, as if they had been crushed and even folded in places. Hair and fingernails and even eyelashes were still visible, and their clothes had not fully rotted. There was metal around their necks and wrists that looked like the remains of jewelry. Two of them were unmistakably women, the other two men.

  “They’re bog bodies,” Gerald told him. “This whole area was peat bog once, before it was drained and converted into farmland. And then the church and the cemetery were built here. But these people were buried before that … and without coffins. I haven’t had time to clean them properly yet; it’s delicate work. Bogs can preserve corpses from decay for millennia; that’s why they look the way they do.”

  “Why are they flattened like that?” Nate asked.

  “It’s from the weight of the ground as it settled and built up around them,” Gerald told him. “And the shifting over the centuries distorts their shapes too. Even so, I’ve never heard of a single body as well preserved as these—and to find four of them! We’re looking at a piece of history here, Nate.”

  “How do you know so much about these things?”

  “I read,” Gerald replied.

  He took out his cigarette case, drew one out and lit it up. His face was solemn as he regarded the leathery corpses. Nathaniel knew that this was the kind of intellectual challenge that his cousin thrived upon, and he was keen to interrupt Gerald’s obsessive curiosity before it really took hold.

  “I want to get drunk,” he declared.

  “So get drunk.”

  “No, I mean completely and utterly, unhealthily out-of-my-face drunk,” Nate explained. “Let’s go into town—we could go on the tear in Monto.”

  Gerald looked reluctant to give up his work. He eyed the bog bodies with a longing that Nate found a little disturbing. Pulling his watch from his waistcoat pocket, he checked the time. It was after five.

  “You’ll turn into a prig if you spend all your time in the lab,” Nate persisted. “Come on, let’s get buckled. It’s how Marcus would have wanted it. And we can take Flash into town and show it off to the girls.”

  Gerald raised an eyebrow.

  “Will you let me ride it?”

  “I don’t think it’d have you,” Nate retorted. “Besides, I’m not that desperate for your company. I’ll let you tell everyone the story of how we caught it, though—you can embellish your part in it if you wish. Look, we haven’t hit the town together in over a year and a half; I need to know if you can still cut the mustard. Now are we getting drunk or what?”

  “Well, since you asked so nicely”—Gerald slapped his thigh in mock jollity—“I suppose I could do with an evening of dolly-mops, booze and belly-timber. Besides, these old codgers won’t be getting any deader tonight. Let’s hit that town then!”

  Monto was a sprawling neighborhood of ill repute in north Dublin, centered on Montgomery Street. Ireland had long been the most irritating thorn in the backside of the British Empire and it was reflected in the large numbers of troops stationed in the country’s capital. There was good money to be had for supplying the kind of bawdy entertainment that all these soldiers demanded, and much of that money was made in the streets of Monto after sundown.

  The pubs, clubs and opium dens that nestled in this pit of sin also offered noble young gentlemen—even some who were still in their teenage years—the chance to experience the seedier side of life with relative anonymity … if they were discreet about it. Nathaniel and Gerald were not. As they rode down the center of Montgomery Street on velocycles, their engines roaring with machismo, the two young gentlemen quickly became the center of attention. Their wealth had always given them a certain celebrity status, and velocycles were not unheard of among the rich and famous, but one look at Flash told the spectators they were seeing something special. Whispers drifted about that this was none other than the Beast of Glenmalure. The savage velocycle growled at the people on either side as it rolled down the street, overtaking hansom cabs and horse-drawn trams. The crowds made it nervous.

  After riding up and down the street a few times to flaunt their machines to curious women and envious men, the two riders turned down a lane and pulled up at the door of a gentleman’s club. A small crowd of admirers followed them at a safe distance. Whipping off their insect-flecked goggles, they carefully chained their mounts to a lamppost—both to stop them wandering and to prevent them from being stolen. Taking off his leather riding cap, each man opened a box on the back of his saddle and took out a fashionable top hat.

  “Right,” said Nathaniel, ignoring the people behind them. “A bottle of wine and a slap-up meal and then we go looking for some ladies to impress.”

  He took off his coat, which was spattered with mud.

  “There’ll be no ladies in these parts,” Gerald told him.

  “Then we’ll just have to make do with whatever fillies we can find,” Nate replied. “Come on, let’s get buckled.”

  A racy waltz was being played inside the club and they could hear the sound of dancing feet on a wooden floor. They were welcomed in by the doorman, who was trained to recognize important faces and treat them accordingly. The social columns in the local papers had already announced Nathaniel’s return. The doormen of Monto could earn some extra income by informing the gossipmongers which teenage playboys were out on the town, and what kind of mischief they created
in the process.

  But another set of eyes was watching Nathaniel and his cousin with a burning resentment. Shay Noonan peered out from a shadowed doorway as the two gentlemen entered the club. He had been about to walk out of the offices of a moneylender, having just paid off his debts, when he saw them arrive. Shay still had plenty of money left over and was intending to put some of it on a cock-fight in town. When he saw the velocycles, he decided to change his plans.

  He had not slept for two nights and there were dark bags under his eyes. It was a close evening, and his collar and the band of his cap were damp with sweat. The word in town was that Slattery, the bailiff, and his men had been asking questions. Jimmy and the other lads involved in the disastrous heist were dead and they had already been reported missing. Anybody who knew Jimmy would be aware that he worked with Shay. The moneylender who had taken the engimal lamp off his hands for a tidy sum would keep his mouth shut, but sooner or later somebody would talk. Shay needed to get out of town. Everybody thought the explosion had been the work of the rebels. If Slattery’s lads got hold of him, he was a dead man—if he was lucky.

  But Shay couldn’t stop thinking about his friends. All they’d wanted was to score some loot; to take some money from a family that had more than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes. Instead, his mates had been blown to pieces. The memory of it was like a physical pain to him.

  This was the Wildensterns’ doing—them and the whole system that had driven him into a life of crime. Watching these young lords cavort with careless ignorance of the poverty and misery around them made him sick to his stomach. He’d get out of town all right; but not before he’d pulled off one final job. Something that would hurt and humiliate the swells he despised so much.

  Waiting for the group of spectators to depart, he checked that the doorman had gone back inside and crept up to the velocycles, looking them over. Their front legs were chained to the lamppost, but the lock would be easy for him to pick. Having seen the gentlemen riding them, he figured they were tame enough. The smaller of the two was obviously a little afraid of its companion. It was careful to keep the post between them. The big one was a beauty; easily worth ten times what the moneylender had paid for the bright-eye. It shone its eyes at him and growled quietly as he came closer, but he wasn’t impressed. He admired its sweeping lines and powerful bulk.

  “Right you are, then,” Shay said softly. “You’ll do nicely.”

  Stroking its head, he leaned over to take hold of the lock.

  The engimal roared and pivoted to the side, slamming him up against the lamppost. Shay cried out as he felt something crack in his chest. He staggered back but was caught as the machine bounced off its back wheel and hit him again, knocking him to the ground. In a moment he was back on his feet, stumbling away. The velocycle struck out once more with its rear wheel, spinning it at high speed as it kicked Shay up the backside. The racing wheel added to the force of the kick, and he was hurled across the laneway and spilled face-first into the mud.

  The engimal pulled at its chain, snarling ferociously. The racket did not go unnoticed, but by the time the doorman came out to investigate, Shay had limped out of sight around a corner. He hurried away into the darker alleys of Monto. A clicking just over his heart told him he had broken a rib—one more point to the Wildensterns. But this wasn’t the end of it, he swore to himself … not by a long way.

  It was the early hours of the morning when Nathaniel and Gerald, drunk and exhausted, made their unsteady way back down the laneway to their velocycles. They had gone from one venue to the next and tasted the best that Monto had to offer; now they wanted to go home. A drizzly rain was starting to fall and the air was swollen with the smell of an oncoming storm. The engimals’ eyes lit up and they whined plaintively as their chains were undone, eager to go for a run.

  “… I don’t care if she had a voice like a magpie,” Gerald was saying. “I wasn’t listening to her anyway. I was lost in the depths of her eyes.”

  They each took off their top hats, putting them in the boxes behind their saddles and taking out leather riding caps instead.

  “It’s wha’ was coming ou’ of the depths of ’er throat that had my attention,” Nate retorted in a slurred voice, wrapping up his chain. “Was like listenin’ to nails on a blackboard.”

  Flash was giving him a funny look. Nate patted its head and went to swing his leg over the saddle. The velocycle jerked to the side and Nate missed, his leg coming down so hard he lost his balance and nearly fell over.

  “Whash got into you?” he asked the engimal.

  He tried to mount the velocycle again, but again it twisted out his way. Nate tried for a third time and this time he did fall over, landing clumsily in the mud.

  “F’ Godsshakes!” he roared, flailing around as he tried to stand up again. “Stand still, damn you!”

  “I don’t think it wants … you riding it while … while you’re drunk.” Gerald chuckled as he swayed back and forth on the saddle of his own engimal, taking his goggles from his coat pocket.

  “I’ll ride it when and where I like!” Nate bellowed. “Oi’m in charge ’ere!”

  “It looks it,” Gerald snorted. “Get on the back here—I’ll give you a lift. Otherwise you’ll have to find a cab.”

  “Right!” Nate snapped, giving Flash a petulant kick. “You’re in my bad books now. You’ll just have to follow us home. And don’t go chasing any bloody rabbits or the like. Stay right behind us, y’hear me?”

  Flash looked subdued and a little hurt. It rubbed its front wheel up against Nate’s leg.

  “Don’t start,” Nathaniel said to it. “I’m really annoyed with you.”

  He climbed on behind Gerald and pulled on his goggles. They rolled out into the street with Flash trailing behind. The city was empty and dark at this hour and Gerald smacked the side of his beast hard with his riding crop, egging it on through the deserted streets. Neither rider was in a fit state to be in the saddle, and with each corner they came dangerously close to falling off. With no stirrups to steady himself, Nate hung onto Gerald’s waist and tried to hug the velocycle with his thighs. Gerald shouted at his machine, his voice loud and raw in the quiet night air.

  The wind rose and the rain began to fall more and more heavily, until it was cascading down in a wall of spray that turned the night scene to brushstrokes in the light of the engimals’ eyes. They crossed the Grand Canal and raced up Rathmines Road. Gerald leaned into a hard turn right on the muddy corner that led to Rathgar. The velocycle skidded, lost its footing and suddenly slid out from under them, sending them tumbling across the road.

  It happened so fast that Nate barely had time to register he was falling before he found himself prostrate on the ground, the wind driven from his lungs. He sat up and winced, working his right shoulder, which felt as if it had been badly twisted. His coat sleeves were torn and the skin of his right palm was in ribbons, embedded with muck and small stones. His knees were in a similar state, visible through the rips in his trousers.

  Gerald was on his knees, his hand to his mouth as if he were in danger of throwing up.

  “Are you all right?” Nate asked him.

  His cousin held up his other hand for a second.

  “Got hit in the mouth by the handlebar,” he said at last, spitting out some blood onto the wet ground. “Think I’ve lost a couple of teeth.”

  “Oh, bad luck,” Nate said. “Front ones?”

  “No, no.” Gerald felt around the inside of his mouth with his tongue. “I’ll keep my dashing good looks, thank God.”

  The engimal was lying on its side, groaning, but didn’t appear to be too badly injured. Flash coasted up and stopped beside Nathaniel. It uttered a worried gurgle.

  “Don’t give me any of your sympathy,” he exclaimed, pushing at the velocycle. “This is your fault and you know it.”

  XIV

  A GASPING BREATH

  WHEN THEY FINALLY got back to the house, tired, filthy, sore and dishevel
ed, they went straight up to Gerald’s rooms. He lit a couple of the gas-lamps and took some iodine and gauze out of a cupboard.

  “We need to clean out your hand,” he said, ushering Nathaniel to a stool at an empty table. “It could get infected. Are you hurt anywhere else?”

  “Just a sore shoulder and some bruises. And I skinned my knees too. I’ll put some coins on them before I go to bed.”

  Nate was gripping a handkerchief to his injured palm and when he opened his fingers, the linen was stained with blood. Laying his hand on the table, he bit his lip as Gerald poured iodine over the torn flesh—causing it to sting like a flash-burn—and started to use a gold-tipped tweezers to painstakingly pick out the stones and bits of grit.

  “Are you sure you’re sober enough to be doing this?” he asked.

  “Not really, no.”

  Nathaniel looked around the room, searching for something to take his mind off his wounded hand. His eyes fell on the four shapes covered by sheets at the end of the room. The tweezers dug into his hand and he yelped.

  “God Almighty! Can’t you be a bit more careful?”

  “Sorry.”

  Nate drew a hissed breath in through his teeth as he felt the metal tips probing his damaged palm. The wind blew rain against the windows and there was a distant rumble of thunder.

  “Let’s have another look at your bog bodies then,” he said. “I need a good laugh.”

  “If you like.”

  Gerald finished cleaning the wound and told Nate to rinse it under the tap before putting on a bandage. Then they walked down the half-lit room to the tables where the leathery bodies lay. Lifting off the sheets, they gazed at the distorted, flattened forms in silence. The room flashed—lightning turning everything to black and white for an instant. A glint of metal caught Nate’s eye and he leaned over one of the male bodies, examining the right hand.