“You’ve been sweet on the drink for too many years, Johnny Sherily, and this is a fact, I say,” Clow said to them all. “Ain’t nothing in the North Grounds. Nothing but money a-moldering in the ground.”
But no one seemed to believe him. Most had stopped digging there, rooting out the fresh cadavers. And it had nothing to do with guards or dogs or booby-trapped graves. It was something much worse, something that filled all their bellies with a cold and greasy stew.
“I like me potions much as the next man,” Sherily said, “but no man in his right mind digs in the North Grounds. I won’t go out there no more. No sane man will.” He emptied Clow’s mug. “Aye, for I’ve come as close to what haunts that graveyard as any man, do you hear? And more than once. Many’s the time I’ve opened a fresh box in that damnable place only to find that something had chewed its way in from below and made off with the goods. Weren’t rats did that, now, was it?”
That brought silence, even from Clow and Kierney. There was no explanation of God nor man, Sherily told them in a grim, deep voice. For under the North Burial Grounds there were great passages and tunnels, the barrows of some devil that devoured corpses and polished its teeth on human bone. Some malignant grave-crawler worming in the earth and the North Grounds was its lair.
“Yes, them tunnels below…and before you think I’m filled with a mule’s own shit, dare I mention the name of Arnie McKellan? Old Arnie who was rifling graves when the lot of you were still pissing your knickers?”
That was not a name any wanted mentioned.
McKellan was in the Glasgow Lunatic Asylum and no doubt would be for the remainder of his days. Sherily went over his story once again. How he’d been found one morning in the North Burial Grounds, drooling and gibbering and laughing. Claimed he had opened a grave and as he got his stout hands on the coffin of a recently interred young woman, the box had been pulled from his fingers into a black hole beneath.
“…And Arnie, by Christ, he said he saw something down there, something staring up at him from that hole. Something like a huge, horrible skull with teeth like knitting needles. It stared up at him with burning eyes, crawling and creeping about, chewing on a corpse the whole while.” Sherily drained another mug, shook his head. His hands were shaking and the color had drained from his face. “No, sir, I will not go back to the North Grounds. And may God help you if you do…may the worms feed sweetly upon you…”
4
It was some hours later when the grave robbers made it back to Old Town and its clustered, ramshackle buildings that were home. And then to Clow’s place, weaving and singing and praising God, king, and country, bowing to derelicts, pickpockets, and ladies of the evening along the way…and a goodly number of lampposts as well.
Clow lived in a high, narrow house in a neighborhood of the same. All were sagging and hunched, shrouded by fingers of mist, and packed so tightly together you could leap from one steep-pitched roof to the next and never have to worry about rolling off…for one roof overlapped another and you couldn’t fit a coin between them. A pall of smoke hung over the jagged rooftops in a yellow miasma, the gutters overflowing with waste. All in all, the neighborhood was as seedy and dirty as those who called it home. It might have been deemed squalid by the optimistic, but was in fact a slum that should have been razed fifty, sixty years before. It was near the wharves and perpetually smelled of fish oil and offal.
A few fine gentlemen in high hats and dark coats passed Clow and Kierney, tipping their canes and wrinkling their noses, a boy running out in front of them with a lantern, carefully checking for missing cobbles or potholes they might catch their expensive shoes on.
“A good evening to you, Yer Lordships,” Clow said. “Ruddy bastards.”
The Clow house was a tall, leaning, board-and-batten house you could reach only down a winding, cobbled alley that was cramped and suffocating. Lit only by a few sparse gas lamps, it stank of pig excrement and rotting fish. It was his mother’s house, and she rented rooms to sailors and dockhands. Outside the front door, a grimy signpost said, THE SEVEN KEYS, and below that, DRY ROOMS.
There was a pen filled with grunting pigs out front, happily feeding on rubbish. Their stench, combined with that of the nearby open sewer, made Clow certain he could be nowhere but home.
Each morning he woke, pissed into the chamber pot, and looked out the dirty mullioned window, seeing nothing below but pigs and sewage, much of it walking on two feet. The sunlight never ventured far into his room, which was overrun by greasy shadows and cobwebs. But the view…now, that was special, wasn’t it? The maze of stacked tenements, the dirty, narrow streets running through them, the shadowed alleys and dismal closes and steaming gutters. It was a fine view.
After a bit of drunken fumbling at the latch, Clow and Kierney fell through the door and right to the floor, laughing all the while. The walls were cracked and dripping with moisture, the stink of cod-liver candles and garbage thick in the air. In the dirty parlor by kerosene lamp waited the Widow Clow.
They both offered her courtly bows and she sneered at them. “There you are, you wee squirt of bile,” she said to her son. “Gone all night a-drinking and a-whoring you are, leaving me here to deal with those vermin friends of yours. I canna think of a bigger waste of flesh and space than you, Sammy Clow.”
Irene Clow was known alternately as the Widow Clow or Old Witch Clow. And a crone she certainly resembled. At barely five feet, she weighed in at an easy fifteen stone, a great lolling slug of a woman pressed into a sackcloth dress. Her left eye had been lost in a drunken brawl and she wore a leather patch over it. As things stood, she had one more tooth than eyes.
“And you, Mickey Kierney,” she said, swallowing down her pint, “your mum should have kept her legs crossed rather than retch out a scab like you.”
Her son laughed a high, tittering sound. “Aye, she’s a saucy bit of rash, me dear mum.” He turned to Kierney. “Have you met me dear mother, son?”
“Aye, a fine lady she is—”
“Piss off, the both of you!” she said, slamming one meaty fist to the table. “Next you’ll be wanting to lick me backside on Sunday, you bastards, you dirty, thievin’, corpse-snatching bastards! You’d both rot in hell, if I was to have my say.”
Kierney raised an eyebrow. “If you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Clow, your mother has a wee bit of an evil tongue.”
“That she does.”
“Her language pales me some and sets me withers to trembling…me being a fine upstanding Christian what says his prayers by morn and night and abstains from vice as the vicar says.”
Clow nodded sadly. “Aye, she’s got the Devil’s own hands in her, she does. But a fine, upstanding woman all the same. Many’s the time I’ve seen the Virgin Mother herself in me dear mother,” he said. “Seems she’s a bit long in tooth this night…what could be troubling the old whore?”
“Her piles, me thinks,” Kierney decided. “Giving her a bad turn, they are.”
A glass flew between them and shattered against the doorway. “Fuck you both, you slimy, mud-gupping warts! Out of me house with you, I say! Out, out, out! And down to your cellar with your corpses and dead ones, that’s fine company for the likes of you! Down there in that disgusting smell…”
“Now, Mum, quit holding a candle to the Devil and be of God and grace,” Clow said, tossing a half-pence into her lap. “I’ve brought ye a shiny new mag for your trouble; spend it where you would.”
Kierney crossed himself. “No doubt she’ll be giving it to the poor, Samuel Clow. A fine and pure woman is your mum.”
“Ye rancid prick! Out of me sight with you!” the widow shouted.
“And that voice,” Clow said, “ ’tis but the gentle coo of a dove…”
Yes, that was Clow’s mother.
She was evil and mean-spirited, but he put up with her…or perhaps she put up with him. He never knew which. As a child, while she fell to whoring and drinking, just about everything was dumped into the lap of Cl
ow and his sisters. It was they who fetched buckets of water from the public well and carried them up five flights of stairs. They what scavenged for firewood, tinder, and lumps of coal. They that hunted among the market stalls with the other grimy street children, searching for a stray turnip or potato that had fallen into a crevice, or perhaps pig ribs or oxtails from the slaughteryards. Anything to make a thin soup with, something to fill their bellies while their mother drank, grunting and puffing in the bedroom with a gentleman caller.
“Good night to ye, me mother,” Clow said, another glass shattering on the wall where his head was a few moments before.
They left her swearing, cursing the day she let Clow’s poor dead father have his filthy way with her and cursing herself for not strangling baby Sammy fresh out of the womb. They went down a set of sweating stone steps and Clow unlocked a heavy plank door and in they went, greeted by a pungent, foul odor of carrion, salts, and drainage.
“Me private sanctum sanctorum, Mickey Kierney. That where I do a good part of me business,” Clow said.
They lit oil lamps and their surroundings swam into view from the murk, the flickering yellow-orange light revealing the gruesome stock the two had laid in. Two long scathed tables were piled with human bones—vertebrae and rib cages, femurs, ulnas, tibias. Shelves along the far wall held a grim collection of undamaged skulls, from adult to infant and everything in between. Here were cadavers of every age and sex packed in sawdust and hay, sunk in wooden casks and barrels of brine. Here were babies pickled in bottles and salted limbs heaped in cupboards. Staring heads had been salted and women injected with preservative. They waited against the walls like mummies and leered from corners with rictus grins. A great assemblage of charnel harvest awaiting the highest bidder, supply and demand. Like the grisly pantry of a cannibal.
“Aye, I look around me workshop and see coins spilling from every recess, I do. Enough here, I say, to give any forty anatomists a hardening and quivering of their private parts. Would you agree, Mickey Kierney?”
“I would,” Kierney said, pulling a lid off a cask and pouring a bit of grain alcohol from a dusty bottle onto the bobbing head of a woman.
“And look here, would you?” Clow said. “Me latest offerings.”
He approached a table with two small forms shrouded in a graying sheet. Carefully, he pulled the sheet back, revealing the cadavers of two four-year-old twin girls, cold as clay, eyes gummed shut, tiny stiff hands pressed over white bosoms.
“Oh, me fine darlings, look at you, look at the wonder of you,” Clow said, pouring himself a tin cup of gin and toasting them. “Your mother decided she would strangle you, did she? Decided life was better without you, eh? Well, no matter, me and Mr. Kierney will whisk you off to the medical college at first light. You’ll be in good hands there, I say. Better than the moss and crawlies of the churchyard, I be thinking.” Clow stroked their sunken faces, brushed a stray strand of hair away from the one on the left and cooed to the other, drawing a finger over her seamed, blackened lips. “Sssh, sssh, me doves, me lovies, me fine little darlings. We’ll have none of that, now, will we? Samuel Clow will take fine care of you, he will.”
Together, Clow and Kierney gently lowered the bodies of the girls into a vat of brine to hold them over until delivery. Their blond curls skated over the surface for a moment, then sank from view.
“Bless ye, me angels,” Clow said, closing the lid of the vat.
Then he sat about with Kierney and the dead, spinning tales and making plans and mapping out the busy weeks ahead. For as long as God was on their side, they decided, there was no end in sight. The doctors wanted the beef and they were the men who could offer them a fine selection for even the most discriminating anatomical palate.
Clow uncorked a fresh bottle of gin and had some trouble doing so, being that he could barely stand by that point. “Oi, have you noticed, Mickey, that there’s a certain unpleasant odor in me digs down here? Might be time to move some of this old stock…beginning to get a bit gamy.”
“That it is.”
The atmosphere down there was moist and steaming. The walls were sweating gray water from the sewers; fungi and mold grew in great spreading patches. The air was vaporous and simmering with a rank dampness and the black stink of decay. Many of the cadavers wore cauls of mildew over their faces. All of which made Clow think about disposing of them in the river. No point in trying to bury them beneath the dirt floor—there were already dozens and dozens of bodies interred there. The month before, Kierney and he had tried to squeeze in a few more, but not four inches down, their spades had penetrated into the spongy, putrescent remains of wormy corpses and the stink had been all but unbearable. And during one particularly hot week just last summer, after burying no less than twenty-five bodies beneath the floor that could not be moved quick enough…said bodies had bloated with gas and begun to rise up out of the dirt. Arms and legs and heads bursting through the soil. An ugly business it had been spearing them with pikes to let out the gas.
In his chair near the shelves, his head framed by rows of shadow-riven skulls grinning and grinning at some secret joke, Kierney said, “And what of this madness with Johnny Sherily? Them things he says give me a bad turn, they do.”
Clow shook his head, seeing four Kierneys. He made to take another sip of gin and spilled the cup, the contents running off the table of bones and onto his crotch. “Madness, is all. He was a fine man, was Johnny Sherily, but he swallows enough to give the Temperance Society the cold fits. Gone soft, me thinks.”
“Could be, could be. But at that North Grounds…I’ve heard them sounds more than once.”
“Rats, is all. Them knows where the good eats is to be had, don’t they? Me uncle Roy once told me he was snatching a fresh one at the Ramshorn boneyard…a clear and fine night it was, says he…and he pulls up the box and beneath? Aye, burrows, rat holes. Little bastards were trying to chew their way in from below. Smart that. Out at the North Grounds? Aye, the same thing—”
“But them sounds…”
“Rats, rats, and rats. And mayhap old Johnny is running a sweet and randy game, I wager. Scaring off them fools at the Sign of the Boar, saving the North Grounds for himself. Be just like that old bastard. Sneaky one, him. Do you think?”
But Kierney, slumped in his chair, was snoring.
“Aye, one day soon, Mr. Kierney, we’ll have pause to do a spot of work at the North Grounds, then we’ll meet Johnny Sherily’s skull-devil. Yes, we’ll show him where the blade falls. Certain we will, oh, yes…”
5
They had a rare run of luck not three days later. Over at the workhouse on the east side of the city no less than fifteen had died in the span of a few days. An outbreak of cholera had done them in, the price to be paid for using and reusing the same contaminated water. Kierney wasn’t taken with the idea of fishing those corpses. To his way of thinking, cholera was an infectious, communicable disease. But Clow assured him that there was nothing to worry on, that cholera died with its owner and such was a medically proven fact. The dead had been placed in a single communal pauper’s grave, so they could make short work of it.
So, in the dead of night, they descended on St. Bartholomew’s Churchyard and got down to work. Limned by thin moonlight, spades sinking into the moist, fresh earth, they went at it. All around them, graves and stones and shadows slinking. The sound of crickets and peepers calling out.
“Least it’s not raining,” Clow said and grunted, tossing black shovelfuls of earth onto the canvas sheet. “Don’t think I could take another night of that creeping damp. Got right inside me, it did.”
“Aye, disgusting, it was. Ground still pissing like a sponge. Heavy, this earth is.”
The city had been flooded and the streets were mud. A mud swimming with the filth of an overcrowded population. Not just water and dirt, but seepage from backed-up sewers, the combined waste of emptied privy pails, offal from the slaughteryards, and polluted runoff from the river. The mud had become a se
ething organic brew of feces, urine, blood, and contaminated groundwater. A ripe and heady breeding ground for contagious disease. Epidemics of typhus, cholera, and scarlet fever had filled the graveyards. Some were so full that old graves were opened, the disinterred dead and their attendant coffins were burned in huge pyres, nauseating clouds of black stink rising above the city. Hundreds of cadavers were packed into aboveground vaults where they were rotting en masse, the noxious drainage of which was further polluting the soil and ultimately the water drawn from hand pumps. The stench created was hideous, lying over certain dim, dire quarters of the city in a fetid shroud.
This was the city and the times Clow and Kierney moved through. A seething, crowded hell with no conception of sanitation. An age of child labor and epidemics, of rivers congested with sewage and carrion, of streets packed with refuse, the living and quite often the dead. A time when rancid meat was sold openly, as was the flesh of diseased cattle. Medicine was slowly making progress via the anatomists, but the old ways and grim traditions hung heavy. Prescriptions from doctors still called for spiderwebs, human blood, frogs, insects, and very often the excrement of horses and pigs. With the old practitioners, there was a fine line between healing and witchery, superstition and cure.
“Hit something, I have,” Kierney said, withdrawing the blade of his shovel, grimacing in the flickering lamplight. “Oi, and it’s no box, either…it’s, well, let’s have a look, shall we?”
Dark Screams, Volume 6 Page 9