“Don’t move,” Clow said.
But Kierney wasn’t.
He was trembling now, his heart racing, wanting to run but not daring to. The air was cooler, their breath frosting from their lips, as if whatever it was came with the dank chill of subterranean crypts. Where the stink of the burial yard had been moist and darkly sweet before, now it was positively fetid…diseased, even, with the smell of pus from gangrenous wounds.
The thing was still out there.
And by that point, neither Clow nor Kierney was thinking it was anything human or animal. They weren’t sure exactly what, but nothing sane eyes had ever looked upon and lived to tell the tale. Something born from the putrescent ooze of charnel houses and rotting oblong boxes, something with embalming fluid in its veins that had grown fat and repulsive in the darkness like a spider sucking the blood of flies. And by the stink of it, it had surely been chewing on rotting meat and flyblown corpses.
They could still hear it moving.
Not just with that grim sliding locomotion but a skittering sound like dozens of spidery legs scratching over the surface of ruptured slabs. It was almost too much. Kierney and Clow were gripping each other for dear life now, sweating and shaking and frantic with fear. They looked at each other in the dire moonlight, then to all sides, wondering from which direction that blasphemy would show itself.
Kierney made to run, but Clow restrained him.
“But, Sammy,” Kierney breathed. “What now, what now—”
But Clow only gripped him harder, afraid that movement of any kind would bring it to them. It had paused now, and they could hear it breathing out there with a rushing sibilance of air, like wind blown through pipes and hollows and black catacombs. Now and again, it made that leggy, skittering sound and a chitinous scraping like a crab rubbing its claws together.
Clow thought: Yes, what now, Sammy? What in the Christ have you gotten yourself into here? What have you stirred up in this awful place? For you know, don’t you? You know what it is that lurks amongst the old tombs and graves. You know damn well what it is…that haunter of graveyards Johnny Sherily spoke of, that carrion-eater, that Corpse King. It knows you’re here and it wants you to see it, to look upon its face, the face of the eater of the dead, the thing that’s crawled through unhallowed bone pits and mass graves for a thousand centuries, the Lord of the Dead—
Something snapped out there and something else fell.
The thing was moving again, picking its way among crypts and mortuary urns. And then a shrill, hysterical cackling rose up and faded away, sounding like broken glass and rusty grinding metal. It echoed away and then was gone. There was a great noise of things smashed and crushed, vaults splitting open, and then the ground beneath them rumbled like an empty belly and all was still.
After a time, Kierney found his voice: “Was…was that a spirit, Sammy? A spirit of dead things?”
But Clow just shook his head. “No, weren’t that…was that other they talk of, that Corpse King. And now it’s dove back beneath the graves.”
They both listened to see if it would come back, but there was only a distant sound of dripping, the wind exhaling through the high boughs of the trees. Clow had released Kierney now. The lantern had fallen from his fingers at some point and he did not even remember dropping it. He stood there, boots sinking into the swampy ground, white mist ghosting along his ankles. Fear did not come easy to him, but when it did, it was complete. His mouth had gone dry and his throat was full of sand, black noise shrieking through his skull. Reality had dissolved, and his mind with it. He had a mad desire to either scream or begin laughing insanely.
Kierney looked upon him, his eyes stark and unblinking. “I’m thinking we should be going, Sammy. I’m thinking we shouldn’t hesitate.”
Clow clenched his teeth and steeled something in his belly. He bent down and picked up the lantern. “Why for, Mickey? There’s that vault and we might as well help ourselves to what it contains.”
“But Sammy, that thing, that awful thing…”
“Fuck it, I say. I won’t run from it like a wee schoolgirl. Neither will you, old friend. See? That’s what that evil bastard wants…it wants us to be scared.”
“Aye, and it succeeding, I’m thinking.”
Clow sighed. “Go back to the wagon if you like, I’m going in.” He looked over at Old Clem on the road. Fine horse, that. Clem hadn’t liked that thing out there, either. He’d been stomping his hooves and whinnying, but he had not run off like some lesser animal might have. Brave, that one. “Go back and wait with Clem…ye see something what disagrees with you, Mickey Kierney, then tuck yer wee prick between yer legs and ride off and be sure to wipe the dew from yer girly ass on the way.”
“Now, Sammy…”
“Off with you.”
Kierney took off his Quaker hat and slapped it against his leg. “Ye miserable rutting pig! Damn ye! All right, I’ll go with ye, but ye’ll be the death of me yet.”
Clow led on to the vault, which was monolithic and shadow-riven, cut from some water-stained gray stone spread out with cracks. The door was black wrought-iron, rusting badly, carved into rose stems and vines, quite ornate. In the moonlight, trying to wet his lips, Clow produced the skeleton keys and slid one into the lock. It made a grinding, scratching sound and then the tumblers clicked and it was open.
“Easy as that,” he said.
He gripped the edge of the massive door that rose an easy six feet above them and pulled it open. It groaned dryly in the darkness, the sound echoing out below. Right away, a stench of buried things and damp recesses blew out at them. It was a curious mixture of autumn leaves, dead flowers, decay, and mildewing boxes.
Clow lit the lantern. “Stay with me now,” he said.
They stepped into a massive room with a vaulted ceiling that was patched with fungi. Water dripped and things skittered. Clow felt darkness gathering around him, felt everything inside him run like wax. He wanted to cry out, to knock Kierney out of the way and keep running until he was back in the city proper. The oil lamp threw jumping shadows around them. A set of winding stone steps led down into the clammy blackness below.
Clow started down, the steps crumbling away beneath him, crevices packed with moss and clusters of gray greasy toadstools. Beetles scuttled along the walls, dozens and dozens of them, trying to escape the intrusion of light.
“Lovely place, this,” Kierney said. “Damp and smelling and filled with crawly things. Reminds me of me mother’s womb, it does.”
Clow managed to grin at that, but it didn’t last long. This was a bad place, and on a particularly bad night. They were both nervous now, eyeing the shadows carefully like children in an empty house on a dare. The ceiling sloped down overhead, water dripping from it, beetles scurrying. They ducked under webby growths of fungi.
Kierney wrinkled his nose at the stink of age and dissolution. “You sure this is the right place, Sammy? Looks long disused. Maybe your fat little plum was having a lark at your expense.”
“No, this is it.”
The maid that Clow had bedded had told him a tale of woe. The family that employed her had lost their son and his wife in a terrible carriage accident. Their heads were both crushed but bodies untouched. The maid knew this to be true, for she had washed them with the aid of a charwoman. They had been interred only the day before.
“Looks…old,” Kierney said.
“Aye, it is at that. But this be the right one, I’m told. They probably just shoved the coffins down here and got out. This is it, all right, I swear by me mother’s honor.”
“By Christ, we’re in trouble now.”
As they got near the bottom of the steps, they saw two caskets laid out on biers, but they were old, very old. The brass plates and handles badly tarnished, the fir boxes water-spotted and set with fingers of mold. They had been there a long time. A pair of plump rats sat atop them, busily washing their forepaws.
Kierney coughed dust from his throat. “Ach, rats. Just
like me mother’s womb, I say.”
Clow held up the lantern so they could see what was beyond. Great motes of dust floated in the yellow, flickering light. The floor was flagstone, the walls gray stone with cobwebby recesses set into them from which black tree roots dangled. This is what they saw at first, but then…destruction.
The vault had been pillaged.
Not just pillaged but ransacked and gutted.
Marble sarcophagi were broken open, lids split into shards, their contents dumped to the floor. Skeletons green with advanced age had actually been crushed to powdery fragments as if some great weight had settled atop them. Caskets had been yanked from their berths in the walls and shattered into kindling. What had been in them was scattered like straw in every direction…yellowed staffs of bones and cloven skulls and rotting cerements. It looked like something had chewed up everything, including the boxes themselves, then vomited it back out in a refuse of charnel debris. And over it all, like a dusting of fresh snow, a gray chalky covering of ash and crematory refuse…the contents of dozens of urns that had been smashed against the dirty, sweating walls.
Something had been here, something monstrous that had forced its way up from beneath, something that had left tangles of black slime behind.
“Christ, Sammy,” Kierney said. “Am I seeing this?”
Clow just shook his head. Yes, they were seeing it, all right, and in Clow’s mind there was only one possible explanation for it, but one that he dared not let slip past his lips.
He panned the lantern about, taking it all in, swallowing it down deep inside himself, where it poisoned him black to the very roots.
A single lidless, untouched coffin was filled with so many busy, scratching rats that you could not see the dusty skeleton beneath. As Clow stepped forward, bringing that light up higher, most of the rats scampered away, making for apertures in the walls. Dozens of burrows they had dug through the reign of centuries.
Yes, it was all terrible. But what was perhaps even worse was that at the rear of the huge chamber there was no floor. The ground had been pushed up from below by some incredible force, dirt and flagstones heaped around a great black maw that led down to fathomless black depths. The rear wall had nearly collapsed. The opening itself looked, if anything, like a very large bomb crater.
And Clow found himself thinking: Aye, but it’s no bomb crater, now, is it, Sammy? This floor was not struck from above but from below. By something immense and powerful that tunneled in here to eat corpses and gnaw on bones and caskets and the like. And you know what that something was, now, don’t you?
He and Kierney carefully made their way to the bottomless black hole that dropped away into the nighted bowels of the earth. The pile of earth and stone around it was higher than a man in places and they had to climb it. And all the while they did, hearing stones and clods of dirt falling to unknown depths, Clow was thinking that from above that hole must have looked like an anthill or the burrow of some subterranean worm.
“I’m thinking we should be going,” Kierney said.
But Clow had to see.
Something in him demanded it and would be satisfied with nothing less. He got up near the top and held the lantern over the hole. There was a rush of hot, putrid air from far below. The light reached down twenty feet, maybe. The walls of the passage were perfectly circular, rough-hewn, but circular. Kierney tossed a stone down there and heard it splash maybe ten seconds later.
The lantern shook in Clow’s hand, the handle greasy beneath his fingers. A dreamy, absent sort of terror flooded through him. He had an image of that wall of dirt and stone suddenly letting go and the both of them plummeting to what waited below. For it was there…he could smell it, something feverish and fleshy that stank of putrefaction.
Yes, it’s there, all right, Sammy, and it’s watching the both of you right now.
And it was bizarre and inexplicable, but there was a magnetism to what waited below. It wanted them to look upon it and they could not help themselves. They could feel its pull, its malevolent seduction, and it was all they could do not to give in to it, not to jump down there with it like it wanted them to.
Then the tunnel roared with a peal of hysterical, screeching laughter and they both sensed movement down there, something rising. Kierney slid down the pile of dirt and Clow was right behind him. He took one last look and saw two leering red eyes the size of grapefruits coming up toward him.
He let out a short, guttural scream and tossed the lantern down into the passage, and then he and Kierney were leaping over the heaped debris of the vault, fighting to get up the steps while the ground beneath them rumbled and shook. They could feel the beast behind them, rising up with a roaring, rushing sound, pushing a wave of hot corpse-gas before it.
And then they were out in the graveyard, running and running, not daring to speak. Clem was mad with panic by the time they mounted the wagon. And when Clow gave him a taste of the whip, he rocketed them away, an entire field of tombstones behind them collapsing into a pit as something tunneled in their direction.
But then they were through the gates.
And behind them, that hysterical laughter echoed out into the night.
7
After that night in the High Churchyard, it was no easy bit coming to terms with what gnawed and slithered below. It took many days of fierce drinking to wash the taste of that horror out of their mouths, and even then, it was in their minds and sensed in every dark corner or wash of shadow…that unseen, mocking presence that was waiting for them, ever patient and malign, knowing it would have them one night as they dug and if not then, when they themselves were planted in the harvest fields of the dead.
Ultimately, it would own them.
For, as was said, in the end the worm conquered all.
And for Samuel Clow, the world lost its brightness forever. His world was not exactly a brightly lit place and never had been. He grew up in abject poverty, suckled by violence and ignorance, as had all his people. But that world that had been uniformly gray before with few swaths of color to be had was now even darker. It was cursed and forbidding. The sunniest days were lathed with shadows and the suggestion of creeping things in dark, shunned places.
Some nights he was certain he could hear the thud of some immense heart buried in the earth, and on others he woke shivering and sweating, certain that malignancy had come for him at last. He would wake, tasting something like rotting meat in his mouth and smelling the graveyard stench of the thing, and would be certain that it had been hanging over him as he slept, breathing its corpse breath in his face. In his dreams, he would hear its deranged laughter echoing down the narrow streets, from sewers and gutters and drainage ditches.
And sometimes, upon waking, he was certain something had been in his room, something slimy and immense and oozing, something that had pulled away into the shadows as his eyes opened. Something with huge red eyes burning into him like red-litten gas lamps seen through a charnel mist.
But when he opened his eyes, there was nothing but the tick of a deathwatch beetle secreted in the walls and that invasive, gassy stench he could not explain or maybe did not want to. Just a miasma seeping up from the cellar, that’s all it was.
He was alone, alone.
At least, as alone as he ever was after that night in the vault.
8
Whatever they had seen or felt that night, it began to pale in the rush of grimy days that was life in the Irish slums of Cow Gate and West Port. Days came and went like notions, bleeding into one another, piling up atop the remains of the last until that night became fuzzy and out of focus and they could not be certain what it was that had happened.
“Could be them gases coming from the dead ones, Sammy,” Kierney said as they made their way to the Grassmarket for a bit of public amusement. “I’m thinking it could be. I’ve heard tell that the vapors from them dead ones often affect a mind and put it to thinking terrible things. Do you think it could be, Samuel Clow?”
&nb
sp; Clow liked it. He took what was offered by his friend, chewed it up, and found that it laid in his belly just fine. “I think you’re right, Mickey Kierney. Could be nothing else. Ghosts and spooks and creepy-crawlies…aye, but a load of filth is all it is. You’re a wise sort, you are.”
Which meant, they both knew, that they were going to be doing some digging again. It had been two weeks now. Still, some coin had been turned moving the stock down in Clow’s cellar. Some of it had turned and was most evil-smelling, but much of it had fetched a good price. The truly ripe cadavers were boiled by them into fine white skeletons and, as luck would have it, a local undertaker was bribed for a few shillings to turn his back while Clow and Kierney snatched the body of a carnival giant from the mortuary. Such oddities always brought a good price.
Still, though, it was dry.
Time had passed and the anatomist’s slabs were empty and it was time to get back out into the harvest fields, to fish up some stock for Surgeon’s Hall, and they were ready.
But it was a sad day at the Grassmarket, for it was time to bid a fond farewell to one of the finest sack-’em-up men ever to haunt the kirks and burial yards of Edinburgh and Glasgow—Leaky Baker. He was no friend of either Clow nor Kierney; still, they came to see the poor man off. To see him get that which had been coming to him for some time. Among the body-snatchers of West Port, there was not a dry eye to be had in the gin houses when they learned that Leaky had been arrested by the King’s men and found guilty over to the judiciary courthouse of the crime of murder, a hanging offense. No, nary a dry eye, for everyone gathered had laughed their asses off.
Bobby Swinburne, an old hand in the snatching business who’d apprenticed under Ben Crouch in London, put it this way: “By Christ, the old crapper is getting his just, is he? About fucking time, I say. I’ll be there when he swings, sure I will. You’ll see me dance a jig and shake me prick at him. Happy, I’ll be.”
Dark Screams, Volume 6 Page 11