On his hands and knees, Clow holding the lantern close, Kierney began to dig with his fingers, uncovering a shroud and then a pale hand jutting from it. They got to work then until they had uncovered not fifteen bodies, but quite near thirty wrapped up in rotting sheets gone a leaden gray.
“Horrible is what it is,” Clow said, sorting through them. “Not so much as a coffin in the lot. Just wrapped in winding cloths and dumped in like so much waste. That’s life on the spike, friend Mickey.”
Kierney shook his head, dragging a man out by the ankle. “No respect for the dead, that’s what.”
One by one, they towed the bodies over to the wagon until they had a respectable pile heaped like cordwood. A teetering jumble of limbs and heads dangling from scrawny necks. Without further ado, dawn less than an hour away now, they began tossing them up into the wagon, taking care not to damage them, stacking them like bricks. Generally, the fat ones would go on the bottom to support the others, but there were no fat ones from the workhouse, particularly after cholera had run its course.
When they were done, they fit the sheets snug about their cargo, tucking them in like children but without so much as a story, song, or good-night kiss.
“Now, that was a bit of work,” Kierney said. “Might as well be doing honest labor if I have to work like this. Me poor back. Would ye be kind enough to rub it for me, Mr. Clow?”
Clow spit tobacco juice at him. “I would not, Mr. Kierney, nor will I rub anything else that ails ye.”
“You’re a kind man, a kind man. I always say so.”
Kierney was picking soil from under his fingernails with a penknife. His darting eyes were black marbles peering from a sea of fat. “Been doing some thinking on your life, Samuel Clow, and have decided that your problem is a lack of formal education, it is.”
“Aye, it has caused me some concern, I reckon. All I wanted as a wee nip was to be a fine doctor in a fine hansom tooling about the city, tending to the sick and impoverished. Being that I only had three years of proper education, the schools would not have me. And now I’m just a poor, lost soul what robs the graves of them what’s passed over.”
Kierney nodded. “Society has conspired against you.”
“I blame me father, who was a worthless drunk and me mother, that silly fat cow. Me old man used to beat me severely about the ears with his fists and I think he knocked something loose up there, he did.”
“Cor, he only used his fists?”
“Unless a fire poker was near, you see.”
“Me old man was the same way,” Kierney explained. “Used a barrel stave on me, he did. How did you think I got so bloody ugly? Was him, I tell you. The old sod. I used to wake each morning with a stream of his vile piss in me face, except on me birthday, when he’d dump the entire chamber pot on me as a gift. It’s with great love and respect that I remember him.”
“Aye, enough, enough, then, Michael Kierney,” Clow said to him. “If you were to peel an onion beneath me nose, I could cry no more.”
“You’re a kind man, Samuel Clow.”
“Off to Surgeon’s Hall with us. Old Dr. Gray said he’d take this beef soon as we got it. Much scientifical work to be done, ye know.”
“Aye.”
They climbed up in the buckboard and passed beneath the arched cemetery gates, each putting his hat to his bosom as they passed the church proper. The sun was coming up and they had to cross the city in broad daylight now. It was dangerous, but for the money it was worth the threat of the swinging rope. As Clem pushed them farther on, Clow repeated an oft-told tale of his mother, who quite often strangled her lodgers and robbed them.
The city was waking up, laborers and tradesmen in the streets now with their wagons and carts. Miners and cotton-spinners. Whores were trudging home, their skirts muddy and their faces grimy. Stray cats were chasing rats in the alleys and dogs were licking the faces of men sprawled drunkenly on boardwalks. It was a hopeless landscape of row houses, tenements, and industrial decay. Tall smokestacks belching black fumes painted the early morning sky with trails of dark brushwork. Chimneys were chugging out coal smoke that settled over the tall houses and narrow streets in blankets of soot. Everything and everyone was grubby, powdered with ash, slopping through the muddy roads.
In the misting gloom, an old lady dressed in rags hovered over a potato brazier, roasting taters for the workingmen who might want something hot on their way to work. Kierney tipped his hat to her and she glared at him, pulled the corncob pipe from her mouth, and spat.
“A fine lady,” Kierney said.
“An angel, to be sure.”
“Oi, look there, Sammy,” Kierney said, the reins limp in his hands. He gestured toward a group of crows picking at the face of a dead man in the gutter. One of them was working his eye from a bloody socket. “They’re having a spot of breakfast.”
“Making me hungry, it is.”
They were just touching the North Grounds the smell of the slaughteryards filling the air and the muddy streets gone red with runoff, when they caught sight of a police watchman in his long brown coat and tall hat…and he caught sight of them. He waved them to a stop with his lantern, setting it down and coming over, gesturing at them with his stave.
“Here, what’s this business about, I ask you,” he said. “What’s this all about?”
“Evening, governor,” Clow said.
“It’s morning, you fool. What’s this business about?”
Clow tipped his hat. “Business, sir? What business be that? Just two law-abiding common laborers we are going about our work.”
The policeman, a big fellow with a face hard enough to hammer iron on, narrowed his eyes, not liking their looks or their smell. “Enough with your cheeky mouth, you skinny bastard…what’s under that tarp?”
Kierney chewed his lip, looked at Clow, who said, “Bodies, sir. A great heaving pile of cadavers, it is.”
“Cadavers?” He rapped the wagon with his stave. “Grave robbers, are you?”
“Perish the thought, sir,” Kierney said, grinning like a clown, averting his eyes from those of the law.
“If it would please you, sir,” Clow said, “them bodies under there, sir, them be the poor unfortunates what perished at the workhouse not two days ago. A tragedy it was, guv, a tragedy.”
“Hop down, you.”
Clow donned his hat and did as he was told. He joined the law at the bed of the wagon. The law glared at him, heavy muscles bristling under the coat. He looked to be a man who enjoyed violence. He walked around the bed of the wagon, yanking aside the sheets and looking down at all the bodies. They lay cheek to jowl, a collection of staring gray faces, shrunken bodies, and limbs thin as pipe cleaners.
“And where would you be taking this lot?” the law said, prodding about the bodies, looking for signs of violence, no doubt. He stroked his heavy mustache. “It’s a rare hour for this sort of work.”
“Aye, sir, it is,” Clow said. “But it’s the preferred hour, being that folks wouldn’t like the idea of a cadaver wagon rolling down the busy streets. These are bound for the North Burial Grounds, poor souls.”
The law seemed to buy that, but still he looked suspiciously about, examining limbs and necks.
“Aye, if you don’t mind me saying, guv, I wouldn’t be a-handling them there dead ones,” Clow warned him. “For the lot perished of the cholera and I wouldn’t want you to bring a drip of that home to your loved ones.”
The law backed up quickly at the mention of it. He dropped his stave and brushed his hands against his coat. He withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his mouth, for it was a popular belief at the time that disease of all sorts was transmitted by an invisible noxious gas emanating from filth and corpses.
“Cover up them dead ones, you blighter,” Kierney said. “You’re giving the gentleman the horrors, you are.”
“Off with the both of you,” the law said, taking up his stave and jabbing Clow with it. “You both smell of the grave. Off
with you and your pestilence, I say.”
“Yes, sir, at once.”
Clow climbed up, took the reins, tipped his hat again.
“Go on, then, you seamy bastard.”
“Yes, sir, and God bless you, sir.”
Off the wagon rolled while the law sought a pump to wash his hands, not realizing he was in more danger from that than from the air he breathed.
“He’s a fine one, that,” Clow said as Old Clem pulled them through the muddy, smelling streets.
“Aye. Reminds me of a toad I once had, looks much like him. The toad was smarter, of course.”
And the wagon rolled on.
6
Long after midnight, the Glasgow High Churchyard was a primeval forest of white marble and gray standing stones, crawling morbid shadows and death angels cobwebbed in mildew. Leaning markers, most worn smooth with age, were crowded in battalions, dripping with fungi and pale moonlight, thrusting at odd angles from the damp earth and rotting vegetation. The trees grew thick and tangled, great black roots jutting from the uneven, moist ground like the arched backs of serpents. A mist that was perfectly white and steaming rose from the earth.
“Lovely place this is you take me, Samuel Clow,” Kierney said. “When I was a nip, we wouldn’t go near here. All them stories…yah…puts the frights to me, it does.”
Clow did not comment on any of it.
He well knew the tales, for he had heard them himself as a boy. The High Churchyard was a macabre pond swum by wraiths and bogeys and shivering, nameless things always looking for boy-meat and girl-meat to pack into their empty bellies. Lost or misguided children, sometimes those on dares, would wade into those black, stillborn waters by the dead of night and disappear without so much as a ripple. Nothing but the scraping of tree limbs overhead and the flutter of bat’s wings to mark their passing.
Least that’s what the stories said.
“Me mother said this was where the witches held their Sabbath, amongst the graves and flooded hollows…do you put much in that, Samuel Clow?” Kierney said, whispering.
“There’s only money waiting to be taken,” Clow told him, not a speck of humor or good cheer in his voice. He urged Old Clem down the winding muddy road, eyes looking for things and he wasn’t even sure what, exactly. “Now hold your tongue, Mickey.”
What they needed was silence here.
The High Churchyard was known to be patrolled by members of the Churchyard Watch Association, armed groups of men who would shoot down grave robbers or stretch their necks on the spot. They hid among the trees and peered from the gun ports of the tall, cylindrical watch houses, long rifles in hand. Clow could see the watch house in the distance. It looked like a turret from a medieval castle. He saw no lights, but that didn’t mean no one was around. The High Churchyard had been a favorite haunt of the body-snatchers right back to the days of Burke and Hare, and it was now, these many years later, still closely guarded. The evidence was everywhere—table-topped graves, iron mort-safes, and stone vaults. Anything to keep the snatchers from fishing out fresh corpses. Graves were sometimes booby-trapped and/or stood sentinel by members of the deceased’s family for a few weeks until the remains were far too corrupted to be of use on the dissection slabs.
But tonight, all seemed quiet.
Old Clem spluttered and shook, did not like where they were, but Clow urged him onward, beneath the latticing of dark branches overhead. The horse moved forward, hooves splashing through puddles, the wagon creaking behind. The ground fog was so perfectly seamless that it looked as if Clem was plodding through a foot of fresh, powdery snow.
The air was damp and chill, yet Clow was sweating. Rivulets of perspiration ran down his face and his breath was sharp in his lungs. Clenching his teeth and he knew not what against, he worked the reins, forever watching among the old tombs and riven slabs, sensing something out there. Not necessarily movement but a gnawing sense that eyes were on them, watching and scrutinizing. He hadn’t felt this nervous since his uncle Roy had taken him along on his first snatching. He tried to shake it…that almost palpable sense of being watched, eyes peering from shadows and clusters of graves…but it was no good.
“What’s bothering ye, Sammy? Christ, but I can feel it over here,” Kierney said in a low, cautious voice.
Clow shook his head. “Not sure, but something don’t feel right.”
“Aye…is it the sense of being watched?”
Clow looked over at him in the darkness. “You, too?”
“Aye, right down into me balls.” Kierney was looking around fearfully now, too. “I’m feeling me mother rolling in her grave, for soon I’ll be joining the dear old cunt.”
In his line of work, Clow had gradually lost all fear of the dead. Superstition was something a corpse-snatcher soon dispensed with or he found another job. But tonight, it had all returned…those boyish fears of dark places and lonely cemeteries, creeping things that reached from shadows.
As he looked around, his skin was literally crawling, his throat tightening down to a pinhole. He could barely breathe. Yes, it was there, out there somewhere, among the sepulchers and tombstones, the very thing that was inspiring this terror in his guts, in his marrow, in deep and forbidding places at the bottom of his soul. At times, the feeling of eyes on him was almost too much. It made him shake and sweat, certain he would scream. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought the dead were rising, misting from their graves, grinning and whispering, waiting to get their teeth into his soft white throat.
Yes, something was out there, but it was not the rising dead.
Not exactly.
Clow kept watching among the netted shadows, the stumps, and crowded headstones, thinking he might catch sight of whoever or whatever was dogging them, but maybe hoping he wouldn’t at all.
Kierney cleared his throat of dust. “I’m thinking there’s no people here, Sammy, but that we’re not alone.”
Clow ignored that. “The vault we seek is just yonder that thicket ahead.”
The narrow dirt road cut through the thicket, which was dim and shadowy even on a bright day, but was positively black and depthless by night. The grotesque shapes of oaks and maples and yews grew to either side, their branches overhanging the road, dense and interwoven. Their trunks were thick, limbs seeming to be growing into one another, coiling roots dislodging ancient graves that appeared to be arranged almost in a geometrical pattern.
Clow saw the vault ahead limned by wan moonlight.
In either direction, hog-backed gravestones, sunken slabs, and leaning crosses climbed hills, fell down into hollows, and were consumed by the wild and knotted undergrowth. Dozens of vaults were set into hillsides or atop the low mounds of ridges, lost beneath crowns of creeping ivy. The vault they wanted was set out among the markers, huge and gray and wreathed in shadow.
Clow pulled Clem to a stop and then Kierney and he just looked around, still feeling like they were being watched or stalked, but not so badly as before. It was almost to the point where they could write it all off as imagination.
Hopping out of the wagon, Clow produced a set of skeleton keys.
“Where did ye get them fine keys, Samuel Clow?”
Clow tried to smile, but it came off badly this night. “The fine family what owns this vault were kind enough to lend them to me, bless them one and all.” He paused. “Or perhaps it were their maid, cheeky thing that one. In a rare moment of depravity, I got the fine girl drunk on rum and bitters, took her to bed, and had me way with her. It was she who got these keys for us. Remember her in yer prayers, old friend.”
“I would at that, Mr. Clow,” Kierney told him. “Taking away the girl’s virtue like that, ah, ye rank bastard. Stealing the fine blossom of her womanhood. Ye should be ashamed, ashamed!”
“I was, certainly I was…that is, until I learned that her blossom had been picked, and more than once, by diverse hands. And here I was, fine upstanding Christian lad that I am, wanting to marry the old haybag, only t
o learn that her garden was well traversed. Taken advantage of by a cheap woman, I was.”
“Ah, ye poor thing,” Kierney said, clapping him on the shoulder. “What will yer mother be thinking?”
Clow pulled a lantern from the back of the wagon. “She’ll be disappointed, that evil fat sow.”
They moved off side by side through the legions of headstones and funerary crosses. The smiling faces of carved winged seraphs were covered with cauls of lichen. The ground was still marshy from the heavy rains several days previous, the body-snatcher’s hobnailed boots sinking into the mold and rank soil. They leaped over sunken graves that were filled with standing water and floating leaves.
As they rounded a collection of marble-hewn shafts and attendant cinerary urns, Kierney adjusted the canvas sacks thrown over his shoulder and said, “I been thinking I’m not liking these awful places you take me. This may be the last—”
“Quiet,” Clow said, his head cocked to the side.
“What?”
“Quiet, ye great heap!”
Kierney narrowed his eyes, peering around in the darkness. The countless stones around them looked almost luminous, tangled in wisps of ground fog. Through the interlaced tree branches above, the moon was deathly pallid like a waxen face. Kierney swallowed, listened. Yes, he could hear something now, too. Something big moving through the burial yard, underbrush crackling and branches splitting, a sound like some immense serpentine form was sliding among the gravestones.
“Dear Christ,” he said.
Clow held a finger to his lips.
The sounds kept coming but more subtle now, as if whatever it was was not only aware of them but aware it was being listened to.
Kierney was certain it was behind them. Clow thought it was just ahead. It had paused for a moment, but now it was moving again, rustling and slithering. There was a hollow boom as if a tombstone had been knocked over, and not too far away, by the sound of it. Kierney pressed closer to Clow and they both wished there were weapons in their hands. They were both of the mind that whatever in the hell it was, it would show itself at any moment. That it would rise up before them, undulant and loathsome, a towering column of decay, corpse-slime dripping from its jaws in ribbons.
Dark Screams, Volume 6 Page 10