Daddy struck us, one and then the other. One on the back, as Esther had been struck, and the other a glancing careless blow on the side of the head as if in this case (my case) the child was so hopeless, he was beyond disciplining. Oh, oh, oh!—we had learned to stifle our cries.
In long Daddy strides, Daddy returned to the car to smoke a cigarette. This had happened before but not quite in this way, and so when a thing happens in a way resembling a prior way, it is more upsetting than if it had not happened before, ever in any way. On the lumpy ground in broken and desiccated grasses, we lay sobbing, trying to catch our breaths. Esther, who was the oldest, recovered first, crawled to Kevin and me, and helped us sit up and stand on our shaky stick legs. We were dazed with pain and also with the sick sensation that comes to you when you have not expected something to happen as it did, but, as it begins to happen, you remember that you have in fact experienced it before, and this fact determines, in the way of a sequence of bolts locking a sequence of doors, the certitude that it will recur.
In the car, Daddy sat smoking. The driver’s door was open partway, but still the car was filling with bluish smoke like mist.
Between Esther and Daddy, there was a situation unique to Esther and Daddy, as it had once been unique to Lula and Daddy: If Esther had disappointed Daddy, and had been punished for disappointing Daddy, Esther was allowed, perhaps even expected, to refer to this punishment, provided Esther did not challenge Daddy or disappoint Daddy further. A clear, simple question posted by Esther to Daddy often seemed, to our surprise, to be welcomed.
Esther said, with a catch in her throat, Oh, Daddy, why?
Daddy said, “Because I am Daddy, whose children must never give up hope.”
The Corpse King
Tim Curran
I have made candles of infant’s fat,
The sextons have been my slaves,
I have bottled babes unborn, and dried
Hearts and livers from rifled graves.
—Robert Southey
1
From the fields of the dead, the harvest was brought forth.
Tended by resurrection farmers with grubby fingers, cold hearts, and greedy minds, the fields were worked with shovel and spade and sweat. Beneath a pall of thin moonlight, the crops were plucked from the moist, black earth, torn from wormy boxes and mildewed shrouds like rotting corn from corrupting husks. The harvest of cadavers was piled in the beds of muddy wagons and taken to market, sold to the highest bidder to supply dissection room and anatomical house. The farmers worked their bone fields night after night, thinking they were alone in their grim harvest. But there was another who worked the graveyards and mortuaries, another reaper whose cultivation reached back to antiquity.
Moon-faced and skeleton-fingered, he was the grand lord of the charnel harvest, master of graveyard harrow and yield.
2
Long after the mourners and weepers sought the higher, drier ground of the city, Samuel Clow stood in the graveyard, his narrow face latticed by shadow, his grubby hands gripping a short dagger-shaped wooden spade. Somebody had slit open the leaden, fat underbelly of the heavens and its blood poured earthward. It fell and became a rain that washed the color from the world until it stood shivering and dripping in a dozen hues of gray. It turned the graveyard into a bog of yellow, sucking mud, creating rivers and creeks and finally, a great inland sea of slopping charnel muck.
“A lovely night it is for such work,” Clow said, water dripping from the brim of his John Bull top hat. “What I’ll do for a pint sometimes even amazes me.”
“Aye, but you cannot be blamed for your choice of occupations, things being what they are,” Mickey Kierney said from the open grave, grunting and puffing, throwing out clods of wet earth onto a canvas sheet heaped with sodden dirt.
Clow was tall and narrow, his hair long and greasy, falling over a sharp, bony face in strands like wet straw. Kierney, on the other hand, was short and thick and muscular, his face bovine and streaked with dirt. He had once been described by his father as looking like “a silly pig.”
Rain washed Clow’s face like tears and a cold drizzle seeped down the back of his neck. The sky above was a roiling firmament of swollen clouds, black and gray, backlit by struggling rays of moonlight. The graveyard below was slowly filling like a drum, rainwater creating pools and swamps from which the leaning tombstones jutted like rotting teeth. Crosses, steeple-shaped markers, and stone angels were tangled with ribbons of shadow. Crumbling slabs had drowned and high, weed-choked sepulchers were sinking into that mud ocean like the masts of ships.
Clow looked out across the dire, funerary landscape, on guard for those who would take an interest in the work of resurrectionists, but on such a night the storm had driven the pious to bed and hearthside. So much the better.
The shaded lantern threw a somber yellow light that reflected off puddles and saturated earth, created wild, leaping shadows that crept along the desolate ivy faces and wrought-iron doors of burial vaults.
A draft horse and buckboard waited in the downpour on the winding dirt road beyond. The horse—Old Clem—shook his flanks. All around, Clow could hear the scratching and stirrings of the big rats that haunted the cemetery.
“Think I’ve hit something in me digging,” Kierney said, his shovel thudding against wood. He rapped it a few times, scraped mud away from what he had revealed. “What do you suppose could be down here, Samuel Clow? I’m thinking I don’t like this, not at all.”
Clow hung his frock coat from a tall, chipped mortuary urn and pulled Kierney up out of the grave. Donning his apron, he jumped down himself, brushing mud aside until he felt the rough-hewn surface of the pine box beneath his hands.
“Aye, you’ve found something, all right,” he said, pawing dirt away from the top. “Me thinks it be the Devil’s work, so pass down them hooks and bring Old Clem yonder.”
They had opened the grave only enough to expose the upper third of the coffin. This would be enough for what they had to do. Two iron hooks were lowered on ropes to Clow, and he inserted their tips under the upper lip of the lid. He arranged sacking over the coffin so the sound of the rent wood would be muffled. Then he crawled up out of the hole, wind-driven rain drenching all the spots it had missed before. The draft horse was unharnessed and led through the forest of headstones, the ends of the ropes attached to his collar and bit.
“All right, let’s do it, then,” Clow said.
Clem was led forward, the ropes snapped taut, hooks digging in for purchase. Moving forward at a casual walk, Clem put his back into it and there was a muted cracking as the lid was snapped free.
As Kierney hooked Clem back up to trace and lines, Clow said, “I blame me poor upbringing for all this. Me father was a drunk and me mother a whore. The old man would beat us awake at cockcrow each day and me six brothers and sisters would warm ourselves over a lump of lukewarm coal. We breakfasted on dry leaves and rainwater, then a good beating we received and off to work we’d go.”
“Is no wonder you turned out so poorly,” Kierney said. “But did he beat you with his hands?”
“Aye, he did.”
“Well, that explains why you’re so soft, then. Me old man used an iron bar. Beat us bloody with it, buggered us, then made us chew a mouthful of raw gravel. Was a wonderful childhood I had.”
It was a good lark going on like that, but Clow didn’t care to think of his childhood. It had been dark and dreary and awful, as was the childhood of any that grew up in the Edinburgh slums of Old Town. His story was no worse than any other. He grew up in a cramped, two-room flat at the very top of a rotting, rat-infested tenement with six brothers and sisters. Every winter, dozens of people died from outbreaks of typhus or cholera. By the time he was eight, four of his siblings were numbered among them. Dogs and pigs and goats lived in the same dirty straw as their owners. The heat and stink were unbearable at high summer, as were the flies and mites and lice. By the time he was ten, his father had run out or been killed—take
your pick—and his sisters were selling flowers and he was selling salt door-to-door from sunup to sundown. And, of course, by that time his mother was whoring, dead drunk most of the time. The flat wasn’t much before, but after that it was a vermin-infested cesspool. What clothes and bedding they had were never washed and the chamber pot was no longer carried downstairs and tipped into the communal midden, it was simply dumped out the window onto whomever was fool enough to be lounging on the walks five stories below.
It was about that time that Clow turned to crime as his sisters turned to prostitution. Yet, disgusted by it all as he was, he didn’t leave until just after his twelfth birthday, when he woke in the dead of night to discover rats eating his baby sister. She’d come down with fever and was fed gin by his mother and by the time the rats set upon the poor child, she was too drunk and diseased to care.
Yes, a lovely childhood, Clow often thought.
Then there were petty crime and workhouses and finally prison and now grave robbing. It seemed a natural progression, and Clow was so desensitized by his grim existence, he didn’t see the error in any of it. Things were as they were. For when you have nothing better to compare it to, even a sewer and a rat’s existence seem acceptable.
Clow laughed under his breath at the folly of his life, then went back to the grave.
He went down, his apron filthy black with mud now. He peeled aside the shroud and uncovered the body. It was a woman. Her eyes were wide and blanched, lips pulled back from white teeth. Rainwater beaded on her discolored, blotchy face. A beetle crawled out of her mouth and Clow flicked it aside. He wrinkled his nose at the rank odor coming off her as he handled her greasy, mucid flesh and slid the ropes under her armpits. Out of the grave, jerking and yanking, Clow and Kierney dragged the body up and laid it in the muddy grass. Diligently, they stripped it of grave clothes and threw those back into the breached casket.
“You’ve been on the sweets, haven’t you, dear?” Clow said to the cadaver. “Bit round in the middle, eh? Now, that’s no way to go through life, darling, and you such a pretty thing, too.”
“Oi, quit trying to get into her skirts and lend a hand here,” Kierney said.
But Clow hesitated. Carefully, he pulled back her graying lips farther to get a good look at her teeth. White and strong. Lovely, is what he was thinking. Dentists were paying ten or eleven shillings for good pearlies. Just a wee bit of work with the pliers and the coins would be in his pocket.
Clow caressed the corpse’s face. “Fear not, duck, I’ll be gentle.”
“You going to kiss her, then?” Kierney wanted to know.
“Aye, did already, and a fine romance we had.”
They wrapped her in a tarp and loaded her into the wagon with the others and filled in the grave, taking care so that it would appear undisturbed come morning. Donning their coats, they climbed up into the buckboard and Clem trotted off into the city.
“It’s a fine night we had,” Kierney said, working the reins.
Clow nodded, shaking water from his lavender hat. “It is. Through grace and providence we’ve had a merry run of it. I feel no guilt at the robbing of the graves. We are fishermen and our hooks and nets have been cast, our bounty hauled in to be shared with all.”
Kierney laughed. “Aye, it is God’s own work we do, I would say. Bless us one and all.”
Off to the city they went, to deliver their stock.
3
It was at the Sign of the Boar, over steak-and-kidney pie washed down the gullet by ale and gin, that Clow and Kierney managed to dry out before the fire. The damp steamed from them in coils of smoke. Bellies filled and pence laid, they began the night’s drinking.
“Oi, fill every flagon in the house with cold gin,” Clow said, holding up his mug before the hearth. “Let them wallow in spirits, one and all.”
A resounding cheer rang up as the barmaids made to fill mug after mug. Clow stood there, his eyes dark and his grin sharp as a guillotine blade, emoting warmth and comradeship…or his version of it. Standing there, high and proud and randy in his double-breasted cobalt frock coat worn to fringe about the sleeves and flaps and smudged with grave soil, he thought himself a lord among men. His John Bull hat was cocked to a rakish angle on his head, the crown steaming, the brim snapped tight.
The Boar was a dirty, greasy place filled with dirty, greasy people. Whores and drunks, beggars and sailors, laborers and thieves. They gathered in clusters, flashing yellow teeth and gripping shiny coins in grubby hands. The air was redolent with woodsmoke, fried fish, and unwashed flesh.
Clow returned to his table and Kierney elbowed a buxom whore out of his way, laughing at her jiggling, bare breasts that were blotched with filthy fingerprints. The table was crowded with the men who harvested the dead—the resurrection men and body-snatchers, grabbers and sack-’em-up men. They were all drinking and whoring and toasting the centerpiece—a human skull.
Clow took it up, put a kiss upon its shiny dome, and hugged it to his breast.
Kierney raised his flagon and pressed his tattered and much-patched Quaker hat to his chest. “I drink a toast before God,” he said, “to the memory of the finest digger this sad world has yet to produce—Stubby McCoy. God bless you, sir.”
Mugs were raised and gin swilled. Pipes and cigar stubs were lit and smoke rose above the resurrectionists in a billowing halo. The skull of Stubby was returned to its place of honor, patted and stroked like an adored family pet. There was silence for a moment or two. Silence broken by fiddle music and the laughter of whores, spilled liquor, and the gagging of tubercular lungs.
A sign above the bar said it all:
DRUNK FOR A PENNY
DEAD DRUNK FOR TWO
A beggar broke into some off-key Irish dirge. A ragpicker vomited upon himself and fell straight over in his chair. Two foundry workers arm-wrestled for the right to bed a fresh, voluptuous prostitute. A sailor fornicated with his whore on the filthy, muddy floor while a group of onlookers placed bets as to the duration of the coupling. And everywhere, everywhere, at the Sign of the Boar, laughter and arguments, people shouting and screaming and begging and crying. Fighting and lovemaking and singing and wagering and dancing. And people, always people. Chimney sweeps with soot-blackened faces. Fishermen reeking of oil. Smithies with callused fingers. Textile workers—piecers, loomers, and scavengers—spending the few pennies they’d earned in fifteen, sixteen hours of degrading, demanding labor. The rich and poor alike drank and whored and sang and spilled their drinks and overturned their plates of fish and sausages to the floor…but nothing went to waste, for pallid-faced children adorned in rags would crawl about on their hands and knees, fighting dogs for the scraps of soda bread, kippers, and shepherd’s pie.
Through this human zoo of smoke, body odor, and cheap cologne, a tall, lanky man made his way. His chin was bristled with white whiskers, his gray hair falling to his shoulders. “Aye,” he said when he’d reached the body-snatcher’s table, helping himself to Clow’s mug, “not many good ones left like Stubby McCoy.”
“Well, if it ain’t Johnny Sherily, and him in the flesh,” Kierney said. “Have a drink with us, Johnny. To the old days and older ways.”
Sherily squeezed in at the bench, dipped into his snuffbox, and inhaled a pinch. “All of us sitting here, then, together. What a lovely sight. And to imagine, our ranks thinning by the month.”
“More for us,” another chimed in.
“Aye, for there’s gold in them boneyards yonder,” Clow said, filling his pipe.
That got a few laughs, but barely a grimace from Sherily. The resurrectionists to a man looked up at him like pups to their mother. “Mayhap, mayhap. Gold, there may be…but something else as well, eh, lads? Something not so shiny nor glittering.”
Clow knew then where this was going, what oft-tread superstitious roads Sherily would take them down. Not even the offer of a fresh round could dissuade those grimy-faced men from hearing what the old gent had to say.
“In the
North Burial Grounds, for instance,” Sherily said as if he were chewing on rancid meat. “There’s something there, friends, something one and all should avoid, I would think.”
“Stories,” Kierney said. “Crazy stories spun by old ladies.”
Sherily grunted. “Stories, are they? Yarns, would they be?” He fixed Kierney with those granite-hard eyes of his, impaled him, held him aloft for the others to see. “Tell that to Jib McDonald or Keith Strand or me own poor brother Ronny. Or to any of the other snatchers what disappeared in the North Grounds. And what of Dennis Fahey? Him they found in the morning, clutching a grave marker with cold, dead fingers, his lovely red hair gone white and his heart burst in his chest. And his face? By the saints, all the horror from the dark, crawling corners of this world was bottled up in those staring eyes. Aye…and what cause that, I put to you, Mickey Kierney and Sammy Clow? What cause that?”
Clow puffed off his pipe, smoke billowing from his nostrils. “Well, it not be spook nor wraith nor bogey, you can be sure it is true.”
Sherily looked over those hard, set faces. “The North Grounds are plagued by something and we all know that, don’t we? Who amongst us has not heard them there sounds coming from the moist earth? The rumblings as of a belly or that fleshly pounding as from some subterranean devil’s heart?”
“Rats,” Clow said, sipping his gin.
“Rats, is it?” Sherily laughed at this. “Not rats, me fine young friend, it not be no rats that make them sounds far down below. You’ve all heard them, have you not? In the North Grounds, when you pull up a box…those echoes of something vast far beneath you…the scrapings and stirrings, clawings and slitherings. Rats, you say? My arse it’s rats.”
“It can be nothing but rats,” Clow maintained.
Sherily put those gray eyes on him; they glittered like chips of flint. “Would you tell me my business, Samuel Clow? Is that it? Did I not work the hollows with Burke and Hare in the old merry days? Was I not there when Burke swung? Did I not bring cold cuts to Dr. Knox at Surgeon’s Square? Have I not worked every kirkyard and burial ground from Chirnside to Musselburgh? Aye, I have. That was me, you wee bastard, and I was doing me digging when you were still licking cream from yer mother’s tit. Don’t tell me my business, Samuel Clow, for I know the tombyards and kirks better than the worms.”
Dark Screams, Volume 6 Page 8