Nearby was the high, oval tomb of Sir George Mackenzie, the crown prosecutor against the Covenanters, who called him “Bloody Mackenzie.” Locally, the tomb was known as the Black Mausoleum and was reputed to be haunted, much as the prison itself.
Standing there in the shadows, Clow whispered, “Just wait a moment while I get me bearings. Have a chat with old Bloody George if ye wish.”
“No, I don’t speak with ghosts,” Kierney said. “Especially titled ones, they won’t give me the time of day…not that I blame them.”
“Nor I.”
Kierney pulled his hat off and wiped sweat from his brow. “Them poor Covenanters…me mother was a Presbyterian, I’m thinking.”
“Was she? I thought she was a whore.”
“Aye, she was, and a fine and sassy one at that. Prostitute…Presbyterian…I thought they was the same thing. Me poor education, I guess.”
“Enough with that now,” Clow said. “There were Presbyterians on me father’s side, I believe.”
“And fine ones they were.”
“Certainly. Highwaymen, the lot of ’em. Slitting gobs and stealing purses…God bless them one and all.”
After a moment they were off, following winding lanes and cutting among fifteenth-century fieldstone markers, riven tombs, and lichen-encrusted statuary: winged angels, sleeping lambs, and grinning skeletons wrapped in winding cloths. Tombstones were carved with raised cherubs, skulls-and-crossbones, and death angels gripping human skulls. The moon was thin-edged, the sky black with boiling clouds above.
Clow in the lead, Kierney following with the dog cart, they were in search of a fresh grave that belonged to a middle-aged woman who had passed just yesterday of a heart ailment. She had been very healthy up until then, the undertaker informed Clow for a few pence, and Dr. Gray would pay well, as he was currently researching cardiovascular diseases, especially those of a congenital nature that might, he thought, pass down family lines.
They kept moving, Clow only having the most general idea of where the grave was located. But he would find it, Kierney knew, and would keep casting about until he did so. It was his way. Like a bloodhound, Clow had an especially sensitive nose and he could smell fresh grave earth for a hundred yards.
Kierney looked behind them, always vigilant for the Churchyard Watch and maybe other things, too. He could see the squat and rising mural monuments at the edge of the churchyard flanked by the high flagstone buildings of Candlemaker Row. The tall chimneys and jagged roof peaks scratched against the clouds above. All the multipaned windows reflected bits of moonlight, but were all dark within.
“Quit lazying about,” Clow told him, “and bring that cart along.”
Clow had found the grave now, situated just beyond a wilted hedgerow in the shadow thrown by two crumbling sixteenth-century crypts. All the graves here were quite old, but there had been one plot of earth overlooked and perhaps the family thought their loved one would be unmolested in such a spot. As it was, the shiny new limestone slab stood out among the others, which were leaning and cracked and nearly unreadable with fingers of moss.
It was unguarded, as they had been told.
Down on his hands and knees, Clow expertly felt around the grave for tripwires that might lead to bombs or pistol harnesses or other booby traps. Such protective measures had cost the lives of dozens of unwary diggers. But the grave was clean.
“Quick about it, then,” Clow said.
Kierney drew up the dog cart and arranged what they would need. They unfolded a large tarp painted black and set it over wooden poles atop the grave. This lean-to would shelter them and the light of their lantern. He brought their tools inside and lit the hooded whale-oil lantern. Using prybars also of wood—the noise of iron against stone tended to carry—they edged the slab away from the grave. It was heavy, very heavy, but it was only a matter of leverage, experience had taught them. The only sound was their grunting and the slab grinding against the stone flange it was set on.
But soon it was clear.
The coffin was down only a few feet. Clay and stones had been arranged above to discourage resurrectionists, but they got through it all right, piling the dirt on a canvas sheet. They cleared it away in about ten minutes and broomed away the residue. Using screwdrivers, they unscrewed the lid, taking great pains to pocket each screw so it could be put back in later.
As Kierney was working the screws, a funny feeling began to come over him. It was not the stink of dank earth or buried things but an almost inexplicable sense that they were being watched. He couldn’t seem to shake it.
“Thought I heard something,” he told Clow, slipping from the tent with his pistol and studying the funerary grounds.
Nothing moved out there.
Nothing stirred.
Not even a leaf rustled.
There were lots of statues at Greyfriar’s, and seeing them gathered out there among the crowded tombstones draped with moonlight often gave the uninitiated a bit of a bad turn. But Kierney was seasoned. His eyes could immediately distinguish between inanimate forms and those only pretending to be so.
Nothing.
He knew instinctually that there was no one about. They were alone, and if the Watch was about, then they were far away. Though the air was damp and chill, he was sweating profusely once he entered the flaps of the lean-to again. Clow was taking out the last few screws.
“Ye playing with yer prick out there?”
“Aye, that I was,” Kierney said. “But it wouldn’t pay no mind to me hand, it prefers yours, and so it should.”
Clow laughed in his throat.
Kierney was sweating very badly now. Outside, the feeling of being watched had all but shrank away, but in here…Christ, it was all over him, practically screaming in his ears.
“Ye all right, Mick?”
“Aye, just getting the spooks for no good reason.”
“Well, quit yer fantasies about me poor Christian mother already. That’s what scaring ye. Me father near dropped dead of fright when she opened her legs to him. God as my witness, but there are certain horrors men were not meant to look upon.”
Kierney feigned a laugh,but could not shake the awful feeling that they were not alone. That there was another with them…unseen and unknown but close enough to touch.
Clow popped the last screw and put it and the screwdriver in the pocket of his frock coat. He worked his fingers under the lid of the box and pulled it up and up.
Kierney could barely breathe.
There was no smell of putrefaction or gas. Nothing. Just a dry smell of graveclothes and an after-odor of perfume. Nothing more.
The woman’s eyes were open.
There was a faint grayish pallor to her skin, but other than that she hardly looked touched by death. There was a vitality here that was strong and healthy, the cheeks just touched by pink. Her face did not have that compressed, sagging look that came with death. Her eyes were bright, not sunken in the least or filmed over.
“She’s not dead,” Kierney heard himself say.
“She’s dead. The eyes just became un-gummed and flapped open.”
Clow reached in there and put his hands on her, a not unattractive woman with graying hair and a full mouth, and as soon as he did, those eyes blinked and she sat right up. Kierney let out a cry and Clow fell over, a look of terror on his face. The woman was shaking and gasping, trying to draw a breath.
“Buried alive,” Kierney said.
“Gah…gah…gah,” the woman choked. “Guh…grave…grave robbers…help! Grave robbers!”
She began to scream a high and shrill cry, and Clow immediately tackled her, knocked her back into the box, and covered her with his own body. She writhed and jumped, but he held her fast. He clamped a hand over her mouth. His face was beaded with sweat.
“Listen to me, ye silly cow,” he breathed. “We saved yer life, we did. And we don’t want to hurt ye, so quiet with ye. Just lay quiet. We’ll gather up our things and be off. When we’re gone, ye c
an jump around all ye want, but let us get away…ye hear?”
The woman, though her eyes were stark with terror, calmed, seemed to understand that she owed them something.
Clow released her. “There’s a love.”
But immediately she sat up and began to shriek, and Clow put her down again, this time placing his hand over her mouth and squeezing her nostrils shut with thumb and forefinger, Burking her. She fought and squirmed, but Clow was too strong for her and soon enough she stopped moving at all.
“To the angels with ye, me love,” he said. “That’s it…nice…and…quiet…lovely…”
Kierney swallowed. “But Sammy, that’s—”
“Murder, do ye say?” He laughed, pulling his hand away from the woman, who was surely now a corpse. “Now how can that be, Mickey? She was already dead, and ye can’t kill a corpse. She was pronounced dead, weren’t she? Put in the grave dead, weren’t she? And buried, like? No, old friend, dead this hag was.”
He picked her body up in his arms and brought it out to the cart. Quickly, then, they screwed the lid back on the casket and covered it up carefully. When the slab was slid back in place, no one could say it had ever been touched. They loaded their tarps and tools over the top of the corpse and were on their way.
They made it through the gates unseen, a heavy mist blowing in from the canal. All around them, in those high and dark houses, Edinburgh slept. They pushed the cart over the bridge and to the cobbled lanes beyond. It was a good pull to Surgeon’s Hall.
They stuck to alleys and back streets, places where two men pushing a dog cart in the wee hours would go relatively unnoticed with the traffic of tradesmen doing the same. The fog was heavy and concealing, stinking of river bottoms and dead fish, black mud.
“What we did, Sammy,” Kierney said, a mile from Greyfriars Churchyard, “it was the right thing?”
“Aye, so it was. I gave that there corpse a chance to breathe and she preferred the silence of the years. What more could be done, old friend? I’ll not walk the scaffold nor have me best mate walking it for the likes of that silly cunt.”
Kierney was relieved by what he said.
Onward they went, through the mist and shadows and down evil-smelling closes, the wagon’s wheels ringing out over the cobbles. Dogs barked in the distance and the river misted, the buildings and towers of the city veiled in a morbid darkness. The woman’s feet kept sticking out of the tarp, but after a time, feeling a curious and fated sense of momentum, they did not bother covering them.
It was nearly dawn by the time they reached Surgeon’s Square.
13
At the Seven Keys, Mickey Kierney woke up in the damp stagnancy of his room. His head was pounding and his stomach roiling. He stumbled out of bed, overturned a candle that had burned down to a glob of wax on the nightstand, and promptly fell flat on his face, his pants tangled around his ankles.
“Bloody fuck,” he said, dragging himself along the cold floor like a slug.
He’d fallen asleep drunk, as was his nightly ritual, and, apparently, in the process of stepping out of his britches. Gripping the wall, he got to his feet with some effort and hopped himself to the chamber pot, then pissed. His urine smelled hot and briny, steam rising from it.
Wrinkling his nose and hooking up his pants, he pushed open the window and dumped the pot into the street three stories below. Of late, the city fathers had given notice that chamber pots and piss buckets were to be dumped into the public drain, not onto the cobbles below. But hardly anyone paid attention.
That done with, he collapsed back on the bed, trying to remember where he’d done his drinking the night before, but as with most days, he couldn’t remember. He looked around his cramped little room, thinking it didn’t smell much better than the overflowing midden below. The windows were clouded and filthy with fingermarks and settled grease. The floors were thick with dust and scattered rubbish. The bed smelled, the sheets gray and worn. The air stank of vomit and whiskey.
Enough. He needed some fresh air.
He grabbed his coat and hat and went out into the corridor, stepping over the snoring form of some sailor collapsed before his door. The walls were crumbling, the ceiling bowed, everything stinking like excrement. Down the stairs he went. They creaked and groaned as if they would collapse. On the third-floor landing were the fly-specked remains of pig entrails, blood and grease smeared about. And all the way down the steps, he was seeing bits and pieces: a snout, an ear, a hoof.
By Christ, what had happened?
At the bottom, dressed in dirty chemise, an old woman with one flabby breast on display stopped him. “Oi, ye silly bastard, have ye seen me pig?”
There was straw stuck to her feet, and from her doorway, Kierney could smell rancid pig shit.
“He’s up the stairs, I think,” he said.
The old lady started up. “Piggy? Piggy? Where the fook are ye?”
Downstairs, the Widow Clow had already worked through half a bottle of gin, and this by noon. When she saw Mickey Kierney come down, nearly falling as he tried to pull on his muddy Hessian boots, she speared him with her remaining eye.
“Ye fat little gob,” she said, wiping drool from her greasy face with a coal-smudged hand. “Where’s me Sammy?”
Kierney grinned. “That be yer son, love?”
“Quit with yer sass, ye ripe shit…where is that silly worm?”
Kierney entered the parlor, bowed to a couple sailors making their way out the front door, and dropped into a chair across from her. He drummed his fingers on the scarred tabletop. “What was the question, fine lady?”
“Where’s me son, ye bastard?”
“Why, he’s in the loo a-saying his prayers, I should think.”
Using a sharp deboning knife, the widow cut herself a wedge of chew from a block of rough-cut tobacco and worked it into her gums. “He is, is he? Well, ye can tell that rare bit of puss he can bloody well stay there with his own kind.”
“Yer in a rare mood, Widow Clow,” Kierney said.
“Shut yer thieving, lying mouth.”
“Certainly I will, lady. Thank you.”
Kierney made to help himself to her chew and that knife came slashing out, nearly taking off his thumb. “Oi, ye don’t be helping yerself to what’s mine, ye wee little sore. Sammy let ye have a room, but it were up to me, I’d throw yer foul ass into the street. Yer no good, Mickey Kierney, and ye never have been.”
Kierney smiled. “Aye, ’tis all true. I’ve tried to live up to your Christian ways, lady, but I lack your purity and virtue—”
The knife slashed out again, this time for his throat. The widow swore and shook with anger, wanting nothing better than to slit Kierney right open and dance a happy jig over his corpse.
Clow stepped into the room, seeing his obese mother on her feet, swollen ankles, goiter, and all, stumbling about and trying to stab Kierney, who was laughing and merrily dancing away from her.
“All right, knock it the fuck off,” he said.
They both stopped.
Swearing, the Widow Clow sank back into her chair with a thud that shook the table. Kierney acted like he could barely keep on his feet in the aftershock. “Like some great whale has dropped from the sky,” he said.
The Widow Clow snarled and threw the knife at him. It missed him but stuck right into the rotting woodwork, the handle quivering.
“Now, why ye got to go and get me mother all worked up,” Clow said, smiling. “Leave the fine, fat, murdering whore to her own devices.”
The widow scowled at her son. But with only two blackened teeth left in her gums, the effect was almost comical. “Ye randy shit, I shoulda drowned ye when I had the chance! Filthy grave-robbing scum! I gave me life for you! I ruined me mind and ruined me body trying to raise ye proper and this be me thanks! Turning me fine house into a graveyard! Me cellar into a morgue! And who washes them bodies ye fish from them dank holes, eh? I do! I wash away the grave dirt and worms, and this is how ye treat me, ye di
rty buggering filth! I curse the day I lay with yer father! I curse the day I squeezed ye out! Had half a mind, I’d bring the police in here! Let ’em hang ye, I would!”
Clow was not smiling now.
Something dark and unforgiving had settled over his face. He stepped over to the Widow Clow, pulling a long skinning knife from his coat. “The police, Mother? Ye’d call them fucking peelers on me, would ye?” He brought the knife to within inches of her good eye. “Is that what ye’d do?”
“Sammy—” Kierney began.
“Family business, son, that’s all this is. See, me mother would sell her only son to them peelers and that gets me to thinking I’ve got room for one more down in me workshop.”
The Widow Clow was afraid of no one. She did not back down from man or woman or rabid dog. She ran a house for rough, desperate men in the dirtiest gutter of Edinburgh. But there was fear now in her one eye, and whether that was because her son was capable of matricide or she feared the very idea of him leaving her alone in the world, it was hard to say.
“But I was only rambling, son of mine,” she said. “Surely I’d not sell ye off.”
“There’s a girl,” Kierney said.
Clow put the knife away. “Ye be careful, Mother, speaking like that. Why, there’s resurrectionists in this town that kill for far less.”
The Widow Clow pulled off her gin. “I needed to talk to ye, son. Johnny Sherily was around to see ye early this morning. He said the peelers might be wanting to a-speak with ye.”
Clow glared at her. “And about what?”
“About Ian Slade and his brother, Andy the Piker. Word has it ye brandished yer knife at Slade over to the Grassmarket when they strung Leaky Baker. Threatened him like, they say.”
Clow remembered. But it had been only a defensive measure of sorts. Slade had been drunk and ugly and looking for a fight. “Aye, but it was nothing but a display amongst friends.”
The widow spit tobacco juice into a brass spittoon. “Mayhap it was, but folk in the crowd remembered, Johnny say’d, and they told them peelers all about it.”
Kierney sat forward now. “But there was no harm done…why would the police be interested in that? About Ian and his brother?”
Dark Screams, Volume 6 Page 14