Ancient Appetites

by Oisin McGann

  'Get me a bellows and the galvanizing apparatus from the cupboard over there!' Gerald yelled at his cousin.

  'It… it bloody bit me, Gerald!'

  'It was a gag reflex,' Gerald barked at him. 'He was trying to breathe.'

  He turned and stared at Nate with a strange light in his eyes, his face like that of a saint struck by a divine vision. Lightning shocked the room white again and thunder crashed against the windows.

  'He's alive,' Gerald said in a hoarse gasp. 'It's impossible… completely impossible. But he's alive!

  Nathaniel gazed in utter disbelief at his friend. For a moment he was sure that Gerald had lost his mind. But then he looked at his own hand and saw that it was bleeding again. The bog body took another wheezing breath and Nate saw the chest rise and fall almost imperceptibly. He and Gerald looked at each other. And then they turned to look at the other three corpses.

  It was to be the longest night of their lives. As Gerald tried to resuscitate the reanimated man, Nathaniel probed the throats of the other three bodies. Each one was jammed with coins or gold jewellery. Moments after he had gingerly cleared each blockage, he heard the dry rasp of air from desiccated lungs. The butler, MacDonald, was summoned, along with Clancy and a small cadre of the most trusted servants. The entire floor of the building was sealed off and Edgar was informed.

  The Patriarch limped down to the laboratory on his cane, wearing a dressing gown over his nightshirt and flanked by his Maasai footmen. Standing over the revived cadavers, he watched as servants used bellows to gently push air into the lungs of the bog bodies whenever they failed to breathe by themselves – but breathe they did. He listened dispassionately as Gerald explained what had happened.

  'How is this possible?' he asked at last.

  'I… I could only guess… theorize, sir,' Gerald replied nervously. 'Nothing like this has ever happened before. There is no precedent.'

  'Then theorize, damn it, man.' Edgar scowled. 'We have dead bodies drawing breath before our eyes! Tell me how this can be!'

  'There must have been some kernel of life left in them,' Gerald stammered, running his hand through his hair. 'I don't know how, Uncle. Some animals hibernate for long periods – but they still need to breathe. Insects can lie dormant, sometimes for years… but… I don't know. It's almost as if these preserved bodies are like the dried husk of a seed that can still sprout leaves. Clearly, aurea sanitas is at work here… but I… I've never ever heard of anything like this. It shouldn't be possible.'

  Edgar sniffed loudly, clearly unsatisfied with the explanation.

  'Are they capable of recovering? Will they be able to speak – to walk?'

  'I don't know, Uncle.'

  The Patriarch turned his attention back to the bog bodies.

  'Will they be able to have children?'

  Gerald shrugged helplessly, baffled by the question.

  'We'll see if Warburton can tell us any more,' Edgar grunted.

  'If he can, then he'd be lying!' Gerald retorted, more aggressively than he'd meant to. Composing himself, he added: 'There is nothing in the world of medicine to prepare someone for this situation, Uncle. Let me continue to work on them and see what can be done. Please! If I need assistance, I will be the first to say it.'

  Edgar stared at him for what seemed like an age… and then nodded. Turning to the room at large, he gestured to Gerald's four new patients.

  'Not a whisper of what is happening here must go beyond these walls. Of the servants, only you here are to know of it. I do not need to tell you what will happen to you if utter so much as a word of it. As for the family, we will include only those closest to me, and whatever scientific minds Gerald feels might be needed.

  'Gerald, you will be responsible for their treatment and also for uncovering their past. If this man was a Patriarch, I want to know which one. There are too many questions unanswered here.'

  With that, he walked out of the room. Gerald looked over at Nathaniel and gave a tired but triumphant smile.

  And so the work began. Gerald wrote out a list of the things he needed and men were dispatched to find them. Two footmen stood by each body, ready with a bellows in case their breathing failed. Using a stethoscope, Gerald discovered weak, thready and painfully slow heartbeats and listened to lungs that sounded like brittle paper bags. He inserted gold needles into key aurea sanitas points over each body and connected them via wires to a galvanizing apparatus that ran a low-voltage electrical current into the leathery flesh. This was a technique he had pioneered which had been proven to stimulate aurea sanitas's, recuperative properties.

  Using an eyedropper, he dripped water into their throats, to see if they were capable of swallowing, and therefore rehydrating their bodies. Every breath, every waking moment seemed to require supreme effort for these preserved people, but eventually they began to drink. As his confidence in them grew, Gerald added sugar to the solution.

  Nathaniel helped where he could, following Gerald's instructions, but he was working in a daze. He could not comprehend how any of this could be possible. Gazing down at the first man they had brought back to life after his centuries-long sleep, Nate wondered what kind of eyes lay beneath those sunken eyelids. As if parting the petals of a flower, he delicately pulled back one of the dark-brown eyelids to see. Deflated against the wall of the hollow socket, he found a shrivelled yellow ball with a bleached pupil. Clancy was standing next to him and tilted his head to look closer.

  'If they do wake up, do you think they'll be blind?' Nate asked quietly.

  'I think that remains to be seen, sir,' Clancy replied.

  Gerald joined them, his fatigue starting to show through his zeal.

  'There are other questions to ask, Master Nathaniel, if these extraordinary souls recover,' Clancy added softly, careful not to let the other servants hear him. 'It is clear that they were killed… or at least attacked and then buried in the belief that they were dead. This was an act of hateful vengeance. And to be buried in a peat bog as they were was a fate most often reserved for those who died in disgrace, or were being punished for the most serious of crimes. What kind of people were they to deserve such a death?

  'But there is one more thing to consider,' he went on. 'Because if this man here was a Wildenstern Patriarch – though evidently not a popular one – and he regains his faculties, then he will be by far the oldest living male in the family line.'

  Clancy turned to look at Nate and Gerald. He could see that with everything that had gone on, they had not even considered this.

  'He could claim the family' Nate said. 'He could take over from Father.'

  Outside, dawn was starting to creep across the eastern sky.

  Francie shifted around restlessly in the narrow bed, unable to settle. Beside him, his bedmate, Patrick, tugged angrily on the thin blanket.

  'Francie, will yeh stop yer fiddlin'!' he muttered. 'Some of us're tryin' to sleep, y'know!'

  Heaving a frustrated sigh, Francie rolled out of bed and felt around in the dark for his clothes, which lay in an untidy pile on the floor. He was half dead with exhaustion but knew he was not going to sleep. He had been unable to doze for more than an hour at a time since the explosion. His nerves were raw, he felt sick and he was cold all the time. Memories of the disaster and the men who had died constantly forced their way into his thoughts. Guilt and fear washed over him in waves. This was the third night now and still he couldn't find peace.

  It was still raining outside; the storm had been blowing for two nights and there had been less work to do. Normally he would have been happy about this, but now he found that work offered the only relief for his uneasy mind. He couldn't light the lamp with all the others asleep, and in his weary daze he managed to pull both braces onto one shoulder and put his hat on backwards before he straightened himself out.

  Hugging his coat tightly around him against the night's chill, he crept down to the hay stalls at the far end of the long attic, opened the trap door and, hanging from the ledge,
dropped down into the darkness and the pile of hay that lay below. Brushing himself down, he walked through the stable, listening to the breathing of the horses. Some of them were awake, moving nervously as the storm blustered overhead.

  He had returned to the stables after the explosion looking as if he'd been buried alive. There was no way he would have been able to wash his clothes in time, and he only had a spare shirt; no other trousers, boots or jacket. He had considered fleeing the grounds, but his father's words had stayed with him. They had to act normal. Francie had still been trying to come up with an excuse for the state of his clothes when Hennessy had walked in. The old man had taken one look at him, strode forward and wrapped his arms around him, hugging him tightly.

  'Francie, little Francie,' the old man had cried. 'We thought yeh were dead when we couldn't find yeh. Thank God yer all right!'

  That was when Francie had found out about what had happened at the cemetery. Hennessy – who, despite his gruff manner, was very protective of his lads – assumed that the stable boy was in a state because he had been in the wrong place in the graveyard when the ground erupted. And Francie let him go on thinking that.

  His eyes were adjusting to the gloom and he ran his fingers along the wooden walls of the stalls. Being with the animals relaxed him a little and he whispered comforting words to some of them, reaching over to stroke their noses. He had been visiting the new engimal regularly and was making his way towards the velocycles stall when a sound from ahead of him made him start. A tall figure had come from nowhere and was walking through the darkness towards him. The man had a candle in his hand, but the light had not yet reached Francie. Not wanting to explain why he was up and about, he carefully opened the nearest door and slipped in. A warm damp nose nuzzled his ear and he reached up to scratch the horse's chin.

  The glow from the candle passed over his head and he heard the side door of the building open.

  'There you are. You're late,' a man said softly.

  He spoke like a gentleman and Francie assumed it was one of the Wildensterns. He couldn't tell which one.

  'Sorry sor,' Old Hennessy's voice replied. 'There wuz a watchman out on the lawn.'

  'You don't have to call me "sir" here, when there's nobody around,' the gentleman chided him warmly. 'But you're right. All this new security's going to make things difficult. The place has turned into a bloody barracks since the attack on the funeral. The inside of the house is almost as bad, what with our efforts to raise the dead and all that. We'll just have to concoct an excuse for you to move around with more freedom. Leave it with me; I'll come up with something.'

  'Aye,' Hennessy replied.

  'And for God's sake, don't get caught by any of those thugs standing guard. They'll shoot on sight they're so on edge at the moment. Don't do anything to make them suspicious – we're taking enough chances as it is. The family will cover up my crimes, but they won't forgive you yours. Come on, let's get out of here…'

  The door opened and the sound of the storm drowned out the rest of the conversation. The door closed quietly and the light disappeared. Francie peeked over the wall to check they were gone and then came out of the stall. His mind was filled with questions: Who was the stranger? What was Hennessy doing talking to him in the stable in the middle of the night? What were they up to? What did the stranger mean about raising the dead? But the question that was really nagging him was how the gentleman had got in. If he'd come in through the big double doors at the front, Francie was certain that he would have seen him. Creeping down to the front of the building, he felt the ground at the door. It was dry. The doors had not been opened.

  He straightened up and looked around at the stone walls on either side. Some of the older lads said that Wildenstern Hall was riddled with secret passages. Francie wondered if it was true – and if one of those passages happened to lead to the stables.

  XV

  THE MATTER OF THE DEAF HORSE

  Nathaniel lay awake, staring at the ceiling. Even in the dark, he could see the coving around the edges and the oil painting that hung above his bed. It portrayed an eight-wheeled behemoth found in North America, now living in the Wildensterns' zoo. Gazing at it upside down, he remembered the excitement of seeing it when it had first arrived, tugging at its chains, steaming belligerently and snarling at everyone. He was thirteen and it had been the scariest, most exciting thing he had ever experienced.

  Until the night a corpse had bitten his hand. The graze from the velocycle accident had almost fully healed, but he could still feel the brush of those teeth over his raw flesh. He was unable to get the bog bodies off his mind.

  And he still was no closer to finding that goddamned, bloody Babylon either. Thinking the message might have been a code, he had broken the letters up and tried re-form them into other words, but it did not seem to be an anagram – nor, for that matter, was it a numerical code or any other system of encryption that he or Gerald could think of. But then, how could they tell without some kind of key?

  He had questioned Winters at length, but with no satisfaction. The footman was telling the same story as everyone else. It could be the truth, or it could be Edgar forcing the servants to maintain a cover-up according to the Rules of Ascension. Nate's father didn't trust him enough yet to share those kinds of responsibilities.

  But Nate was sure now that the message wasn't a code. Babylon was not where it should have been and he had several servants trying to find out what had happened to it. And anyway, what did the message mean? If he found Babylon, how would it lead him to Marcus's killer? Was the little scamp carrying another note? Was the murderer to be found in the same place? Did it even have anything to do with the murder at all?

  Nate let out a yell of frustration and thumped his head against his pillow.

  Climbing out of bed, he pulled on a dressing gown and made his way down to the laboratory. As the elevator doors slid open on the floor where Gerald had his rooms, Nate heard a low moaning sound. Three voices were softly wailing in a haunted chorus of pain. He hurried along the hallway. It could only be the bog people, and this was the first time he had heard their voices.

  He was not surprised to find Gerald awake. The four ravaged figures were breathing unaided and his cousin was watching them as if hypnotized. The bodies were covered by blankets and a fire burned fiercely in the fireplace, but still they shivered uncontrollably. There were still gold needles visible, sticking out of their flesh, but the electrical wires had been removed. They had Gerald's complete attention now: all the other bones and corpses unearthed by the explosion were gone; reassembled and returned to their graves. He was spending every waking hour assisting them in their recovery. He looked up with a start and greeted Nate with a nod.

  'How long have they been making that racket?' Nate asked.

  'Started about an hour ago,' Gerald replied. 'They're still not conscious – it's as if they're in a delirious state. Well, three of them anyway; this fourth one hasn't made a sound.'

  He indicated the taller of the two males. The man's body was in the worst state of all of them, and at nearly seven feet tall, was easily the largest. They had found wounds all over his body and it was clear that he had not been buried without a struggle.

  'Quite the brute, isn't he?' Gerald muttered. 'Doesn't seem to be much fight in him now. Not like the others.'

  The moaning filled the room, an aching, sorrowful noise. Nate found the sound deeply disturbing.

  'It's bloody awful,' he breathed.

  'You've been hurt enough times yourself… and you've had to heal,' Gerald said quietly. 'Think about it. You know what it's like to have a wound close up, or have a broken bone knit itself back together. It's painful. Sharp pain eventually subsides to a throbbing, then the itching and discomfort of healing, the feeling of being fragile… mortal. Their bodies are just starting to feel again after hundreds of years. Their entire physiologies are rebuilding themselves; their organs are beginning to function again, their nerve endings are growing back
. Ever come back inside on a freezing cold day and felt the pain in your hands as they started to thaw out?'

  Nathaniel nodded.

  'These people are coming back from the dead! Gerald whispered. 'And every inch of their bodies is in absolute agony'

  Nate leaned over to take a closer look at one of the women. She lay on the table with blankets tucked up to her chin, her feeble jaw opened as wide as it could, moving slightly as she groaned. The woman had the remains of black hair and a set of what must once have been good teeth. Gold needles stuck out of her cheeks and jaw, and he could see that her flesh was paler and already seemed to be filling out. Her body had lost some of its flattened appearance. Her eyelids did not look as sunken as before. When he touched the skin it was still cold, but it no longer had that dead, leathery quality.

  The other woman had red hair and a misshapen face, which had been crushed crooked by the ground that had buried her. As she moaned, her shivering body gave sudden twitches. When she was found, one of her legs had been folded back across her body at an impossible angle; Nate noticed that it had been straightened out.

  'The bones are regaining their original shapes?' he asked.

  'Yes.' Gerald nodded. 'Don't ask me how. I've been resetting where I could, but it wouldn't be possible if their limbs kept the shape the ground had forced upon them. It's the same with their skulls and their teeth too – they're recovering their original forms. It's another mystery to be solved.'

  Nate looked at the shapes stretched out under the thick blankets. For the first time he began to see them as people, rather than archaeological oddities.

  'We should put them into beds,' he said.

  Gerald straightened up.

  'You're right, of course,' he agreed. 'I wasn't thinking. We should try and make them as comfortable as we can.'

  While Nate examined each of the patients more closely, his cousin gave some instructions to a servant standing unobtrusively in a corner. The man bowed and left the room. Nate looked at his own hand, thinking about the wound on his palm that had almost healed. Normal people's injuries did not disappear in a couple of days. He and these strange bodies shared a link he could not comprehend. Where had this unearthly power come from?