Dark Screams, Volume 6

by Dark Screams- Volume 6 (retail) (epub)

  Dr. Gray’s anatomy school.

  A couple of regal, elegantly dressed men passed Clow and Kierney, snapping open umbrellas and ignoring the men entirely.

  Kierney looked over his shoulder at the clock on the steeple down the hill. “Oi, we’re late,” he said.

  “Off with us, then,” Clow said.

  They pushed the cart over to the rear entrance of the anatomy school, a wind kicking up now and spraying rain in their faces. It was an ugly night, but they’d worked worse. Dr. Gray had need of the complete skeletons of a boy and girl both under ten years of age, and Clow was only too happy to oblige. He had the both of them in stock, just a bit of washing and dusting and those bones were shiny and proper-looking.

  They knocked on the door and it was answered by Gray almost immediately. He was tall and stern, with piercing eyes like needles. Dressed in a surgical apron dark with old stains, he motioned them in.

  “And be quick about it,” he said.

  They brought their crates down the stairs and set them atop a scathed wooden table. Anxiously, Gray opened them and examined the bones within. He studied scapulas and tibias, baskets of rib cage and pelvic girdles with an appraising, expert eye.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Interesting…interesting.”

  “To your liking, guv?” Kierney said.

  “We shall see, we shall see,” Gray said, examining the vertebral columns with a magnifying glass.

  Kierney looked at Clow and he smiled. Good old Dr. Gray. A fine enough man in his own way, but a bit fussy, a bit overbearing. But he was no fancy high-hat, and they both knew it. Though he exuded culture, intelligence, and sophistication, they both knew he’d been born in the slums of Glasgow, working himself out step-by-step and putting himself through medical school. Now he was a surgeon and anatomist of no little skill. But when they were with him sometimes, they could still see it in his eyes…that predatory gleam that bespoke humble, lean beginnings. He was a gentleman now, to be sure, but there was something stark and subtly evil about him that told you flat out you did not ever wish to cross him.

  Gray cleared his throat, studying first the wrist bones, then the skull of the girl. “This girl…seven, no, eight years of age…excellent. She died of meningitis, yes.”

  Clow chuckled. “Ye always know, don’t ye, Doctor?”

  Gray gave him a withering look. “It’s my business to know. You’ll not pass any murder victims onto me, Clow. I’m not Knox. I don’t plan to be persecuted.”

  “Of course not,” Kierney said.

  Gray gave him the look now. “Yes…”

  The cellar was made of gray, chilled concrete blocks that dripped water. A series of tubs was set out into which cadavers were dunked into preservative, left until needed. The air was close and stank of formaldehyde and alcohol and sweet decay. The cadaver of a middle-aged man was spread over a wooden table, his yellow flesh waxen and his eyes glazed over. He was slit open from crotch to throat, the flaps of skin pinned down so the viscera was on display, intestine and stomach and liver. Cold and meat-smelling. The top of his skull had been expertly removed, a bloody saw lying nearby. There was a tray of instruments arranged at the corpse’s feet. His brain was bobbing in a glass jar of serum.

  “A bit of private research,” Gray said.

  He poured himself a glass of claret, swirled its contents in the light of the gas lamps. He tasted the purple liquid, nodded, and dropped a few coins into Clow’s hand.

  “Thank ye, guv,” Clow said.

  “Before you leave, gentlemen,” Gray said, “tell me of John Sherily. He has not been by in some time…is he ill?”

  Clow swallowed. “He’s gotten a bit superstitious, Doctor. Afeared of things what go bump in the night.”

  “Sad, very sad,” Gray said.

  “It is at that,” Kierney put in. “And him like a dear father to me. It saddens me poor tired heart, it does.”

  Gray and Sherily went back together many years. It looked as though Gray was remembering each of them. “Mr. Sherily is a wise man, you know. You may think him a superstitious fool, but he is hardly that. Is it the North Grounds again?”

  Clow nodded. “Johnny claims there’s…oh, it’s all bosh, not the sort of thing an educated gent would want to hear.”

  Gray lifted an eyebrow. “Amuse me, then.”

  “Well, sir, it’s that Johnny believes there’s something in the North Grounds what eats corpses and the like.”

  “And you don’t believe that?”

  Clow laughed nervously. “Not me. Rats, I say, nothing but the rats. Them graveyard rats can be quite fearsome, ye know.”

  “Yes, I know.” Gray swallowed more claret. “But these stories do not concern you? Nor the missing resurrectionists and those poor souls that have been driven mad?”

  Kierney laughed. “Not in the least! We laugh at spooks and boggles, we do!”

  Gray looked at him like he thought he was a fool beneath contempt. “Then you will have no problem gathering certain materials I may need in the North Grounds?”

  Clow assured him that they would not, would be only too happy to fill any orders Gray needed for his work and that of his students.

  “Excellent,” Gray said, chuckling at some secret joke. “As they say, gentlemen, God protects fools. And with that, I bid you good night.”

  Clow and Kierney left, glad to be free of the morbid Dr. Gray and the embalming stink of his workroom. They nearly ran up the steps and out into the rain, each wondering if Gray had been pitying them, warning them, or merely laughing at them.

  10

  If the lives of grave robbers loomed large and grim to the street rats and residents of Edinburgh and Glasgow—the sort of thing that fueled macabre bogey stories by hearthside and wild tales of evil men opening graves and plundering tombs by moonlight—they also inspired fear. For the crowded narrow byways of West Port and the shadowy, foul-smelling cul-de-sacs off the Trongate were thought by young and old to be teeming with gangs of body-snatchers, desperate and disturbed men who waited in alleys and dark doorways with sacks and chloroform pads and empty trunks. After the murder spree of Burke and Hare, it was not just the dead that had to worry, but the living. For there was a lot less work involved in snatching a fresh body than in prying open a grave.

  Some of these fears were justified, others mere fantasy.

  The winds off the Trongate in Glasgow were considered to be composed of a miasmic vapor produced by chloroform and gases emitted by decomposing bodies the body-snatchers had tucked down into those seething, polluted waters. One whiff of them was enough to make you swoon and two or three would put you out completely…and then, from the darks and damps and desolate places, the body-snatchers themselves would rise like rats seeking carrion.

  And in West Port, wicked tales had existed long before Burke and Hare and their compatriots arrived on the scene. For centuries, the area was considered a place of malignance and iniquity. A place of terrifying legendry and stark belief, centuried tradition that had as yet not been shrugged off. The narrow winding closes and crooked stairways and rotting medieval houses were thought to be the haunts of witches and devils. People vanished in those high houses and cobbled, gaslit lanes and they had, it was said, since man had first began to hew the city from the dark primeval forests.

  So there were always stories to be told if you wanted to listen.

  And the grave robbers fit seamlessly into that patchwork of folktale and sinister tale-telling. They themselves inspired countless nightmares and why not? This was the era of the Edinburgh monsters, William Burke and William Hare, and their London colleague, Ben Crouch. To the massed uneducated poor of the early nineteenth century, these were bogeyman and skulking devils, cautionary tales used to keep children in line and the young from straying into the more degenerate byways of the city. These men inspired armies of resurrectionists, a great number of them medical students eager to obtain the raw materials needed in the anatomy theaters. There were markets for teeth and bones, ev
en hair and fat.

  No corpse was safe.

  Mourners followed their deceased loved ones to cemeteries, for very often the bodies were snatched before burial. Family crypts were broken into and undertakers bribed. Men, women, children, it did not matter; they were all fair game for the surgeon’s knife.

  People were afraid to go out by night, and if someone arrived home an hour or two late, everyone was certain they had been Burked and stolen away to the dissection slab.

  But through it all, some, like the Churchyard Watch Association, remained vigilant, building high watch houses and patrolling graveyards. It was at great risk to themselves that the resurrectionists operated. For if they were captured, there were not only fines and imprisonment but often terrible abuse at the hands of the watch or mourning family members. Body-snatchers were hanged and beaten, whipped and stabbed, burned and even buried alive on a few occasions. But, then, their activities were at bitter odds with Scottish burial tradition, which promised each man and woman the life hereafter. Death customs had run deep and unchanging for countless centuries. Mirrors were covered at the time of death, clocks stopped and not restarted until after the funeral. Belief in spirits and ghosts was widespread. The art of sin-eating was openly practiced. During the wake, candles were placed beside the corpse, then a saucer of unmixed salt and earth was laid upon its breast…the earth being symbolic of the body’s corruptibility and salt of the immortal soul.

  Even the body-snatchers themselves had developed an interesting body of lore, not that this was surprising, considering the beef they handled and the places they worked.

  In the pubs and gin houses, when candles burned low and the snatchers were deep in their cups, they would tell lurid stories of things seen in midnight graveyards, of grave robbers who disinterred corpses not for profit but for pleasure and dark ritual. There was old Peter Crybbe, who unearthed cadavers and made furniture and clothing from their skin and bones and who wasn’t above lunching on a fresh and tasty morsel. There was Dr. Leith, who paid well for not only bones and bodies but for tissues and limbs and organs that he used in his experiments. The story went that his tall, leaning house was a veritable mortuary of body parts, many resurrected by diabolical methods…awful, pale things swimming in jars of serum and alcohol that moved of their own accord.

  This was also the age of chemical galvanism, when doctors and scientists tried to resurrect the dead via electric shock and chemical apparatus. Though much of their work wasn’t far removed from that of the alchemists, some of it was actually successful. George Foster, who was executed for the murder of his wife and child, was reanimated briefly by surgeons who watched in horror as he sat up on the slab, trembled, then screamed before collapsing into death once again. One of those present died of fright. A murderer named Clydesdale was animated briefly in Glasgow after being attached to a Voltaic pile…he contorted and shuddered, looked around, and then died a second time. Electricity was used successfully to bring back drowning victims and those without undue physical trauma. In Germany, the body of a notorious criminal was noticed to be supple and warm some hours after its hanging in the public square. The surgeons present believed they could revive him with sufficient attention…but given that the man was a convicted murderer, it was decided that he should stay dead. So without further ado he was dissected.

  At the time Samuel Clow and Mickey Kierney practiced their ghastly art, tales of horrors met in graveyards were at an all-time high. Diggers were disappearing and nobody exactly knew why. As the ranks of the resurrectionists thinned, the more practical-minded said that many of them had simply quit the business because of the increased pressure by the Churchyard Watch or had been captured and killed by mourners. Very pat, very rational…yet it did not explain the diggers that were found mad or mutilated in kirkyards come morning, and it sure as hell did not explain how it was that portions of ancient graveyards had collapsed as if from the cave-in of some underground network. City officials claimed it was merely subsurface subsidence, but the diggers themselves knew better. Long had they been whispering about something that tunneled beneath the burial grounds, something that fed on noisome corpses and sharpened its teeth on bones. Many had seen it, and very few of them came out of the experience with their minds intact.

  Samuel Clow and Mickey Kierney had not seen it, but they had heard it and smelled it and felt its nefarious presence with some sensory network that was much, much older than man’s five known senses. And in their hearts, they believed. Maybe they wouldn’t admit as such out loud and maybe they were the first to deride others about the Corpse King, but they believed, all right. One rainy night at the Hogshead Inn over jugged hare and capers, Johnny Sherily downed a pint and wiped foam from his white beard, slammed his tin cup on the table. “Ye say I shouldn’t retire, boys? Ye say I should a-keep digging and carting the meat to Surgeon’s Hall? Well, yer wrong, the lot of you. The trade I practiced with Willy Burke afore he got randy is not safe no more.”

  “Aye, yer getting old is what,” Kierney said.

  “Age, ye say?” Sherily laughed, but there was no humor in his voice. “Listen, ye wee boil, I’m twice the man you are and I’ll not see sixty again. I can open a grave in half the time it takes ye and fish out what’s inside with me bare hands. These same hands what could break yer fool skull open…do ye doubt that, Mickey Kierney?”

  “Not at all, Johnny. Ye always were a violent sort.”

  “Ah, you and that pissing mouth, Mickey.” Sherily paused, eyeing Kierney with anger but also with pity. “Listen to me, all of ye. For what crawls below is not just out at the North Grounds no longer, it’s everywhere, a-digging and a-chewing.”

  “I’ll not listen to such rot,” Clow said. “Crazy, is what it is.”

  Sherily sighed. “No matter, Sammy, no matter. For I see it in yer eyes. Ye know more than ye say regardless of yer glib tongue. I will not go out to them boneyards by night, not again. They can say all they want about subsidence, but it’s all shit and shaddock. For the earth what collapses in them graveyards heresabouts does so in a winding pattern as of passages below…passages tunneled by something a-long and a-slithering. And do ye need me to tell ye what that something is, Sammy? Do ye need me to put a name to what creeps and feeds?”

  11

  The weeks following Leaky Baker’s hanging were busy ones for Clow and Kierney. They jumped back into the business with a vengeance. They didn’t discuss the Corpse King or anything they couldn’t explain to their own satisfaction; they just did what they did best. They managed to move a lot of their stock and much more had to be dumped into the Union Canal. But even with that, the cellar still held no less than two dozen corpses, in part and in whole. And that didn’t take in the bones or what was in the casks and barrels.

  They were a busy duo, peddling their wares and selling the raw materials of the grave. Always plenty of doctors needing fresh specimens for their teaching and private research. In a city where almost ninety-five percent of the population lived well below the poverty level, Clow and Kierney were living like lords. Night after night was a gluttony of liquor and whores.

  But not all of it was good.

  People were tiring of the gruesome tales of rifled graves and stolen bodies, and the Churchyard Watch had been strengthened, guarding over graves until the interred were far too corrupt to be of use to anyone. Clow and Kierney ran afoul of them several times, escaping under a volley of rifle balls more than once. But they had special orders and those orders had to be filled. On more than one occasion, they had to “walk” the corpses through busy streets. Using specially designed manacles shackled to their ankles and those of a corpse, they would walk a cadaver between them, holding it up like a drunk, moving its feet as they moved their own. To any who noticed, they were just two men walking a drunk home.

  So after a particularly successful week, the bad thing happened.

  12

  Up until the time of Leaky Baker’s execution, neither Clow nor Kierney had ever Burked
a soul. They dealt with the dead and had no interest in producing corpses. And it was not that either man was above murder, for the times were dark and desperate indeed, but such things were to be avoided at all costs. For them, the graves would supply what was needed; they would not stoop to becoming another Burke and Hare. They were resurrectionists, not killers, and they took a certain pride in the fact. Though, truth be told, people were so very incensed by the activities of corpse-snatching that they saw little difference between Burkers and diggers—all were to be dealt with in the same way: at the end of a rope.

  No, up until the time of Leaky Baker’s execution, Burking was not something either man gave serious thought to.

  And then came the night at Greyfriars Churchyard.

  It wasn’t until well after midnight when they entered the high black iron gates. The Churchyard Watch was about, so they took special pains. They were both armed with navy flintlock pistols and left Clem and the wagon at home, pulling a dog cart behind them, the axles of which had been carefully greased so as to make no sounds. Quietly, then, they moved among the moss-green trees, headstones, and tabletop slabs, some of which had been there for centuries. The air was moist, threatening rain, and a gray mist hung in the air.

  They paused for a moment alongside the high brick walls of the Covenanter’s Prison, that ugly drab structure in the High Kirk that had once housed the Covenanters, the seventeenth-century Scottish Presbyterians who were persecuted by Charles II. December 7, 1666, they were hauled out of Haddock’s Hole, as they called the prison, and found guilty to a man. They were all sentenced to be hanged on the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh. As many as ten at a time had their necks stretched on a single scaffold. Afterward, they were dismembered, the individual pieces of their anatomy put on public display in the Covenanters’ own localities as a warning.