“Because they’re gone, vanished into the night.” She looked from Clow to Kierney. “Johnny say’d there were no foul play, but something worse. He say’d they’d gone up to the North Burial Grounds to fish out a corpse…only they never came back out…”
14
“We’ll do it, Mickey, to prove to ourselves that we’ve not a lick to fear about,” Clow said later that night as he steered Old Clem down the sooty byways of Edinburgh.
“But the North Grounds…”
“Nothing to fear, friend, nothing to fear. Remember? It were the gas that made us see and hear that which were not there at all.”
Kierney nodded but did not look convinced.
The night was quiet. There was only the sound of Old Clem’s hooves on the wet cobblestones, the creak of the buckboard he towed. A few stray autumn leaves blew through the air. To either side, dark-gabled houses of stone and half-timber rose up, leaning out over the street until it seemed their sharp-peaked roofs would touch. They cast thick, reaching pools of shadow into the narrow, winding avenue. Lamps had been extinguished and shutters closed. Only drunks and dogs and rats prowled the lonely wynds now.
Other than grave robbers, that was.
It was November, and soon the ground would be like trying to dig through flint, so Clow figured it was best to lay in a supply of cadavers while they had the chance. Come winter and the snows, the digging was over. Bodies were stored in aboveground vaults and the competition to get at them could be fierce and often dangerous.
“But what of Ian Slade and his brother? Were no gas that made them disappear, Sammy Clow.”
“Rats.”
“Rats?”
Clow nodded. “I’m thinking it must be, Mickey. I told ye the story of me uncle Roy at Ramshorn Cemetery? How them rats had burrowed into that coffin from below?”
“Ye did.”
“Well, that’s what we got here and that’s why were going armed. Not just for the Watch, but for them rats.”
“Ye think rats killed Slade and his brother?”
Clow handed him the reins and packed his clay pipe. “Aye. Rats it were. But not just any rats. I heard tell from Casket Jack down at the Gray Goat about this Russian bark what run aground in the canal two centuries ago, spilled its cargo right over the wharf. She was boarded, but there weren’t no living men aboard, nothing but skeletons and piles of bone that had been gnawed and worried upon. She came aground one dark October night and those that saw her said that hundreds and hundreds of rats came running out…big and gray and red-eyed…the size of cats, they said.” He struck a match off his fingernail and lit his pipe, clouds of smoke wafting over his shoulder. “Now, hear me on this, Mickey, these were no ordinary ship’s rats. They were big and fierce and they had killed the men on that ship, stripped ’em right to bones, the evil bastards. I heard this same story or something like it from me uncle Roy.”
Kierney said, “Rats that kill men…and eat them? Oh, it’s a fable, Sammy. Them rats feed on the dead, sure enough, and they’ll attack ye if yer too weak to fight back…but to take down healthy, able men? It’s a fable, sure it is.”
But Clow shook his head. “No, ye’ve me word on this, me fine old friend. Rats. Rats what out of hell. So we’ve come prepared to deal them a hurt, just look in the back of the wagon. See what ye might there.”
Holding a kerosene lantern aloft, Kierney pulled back the tarps and spilled aside the shovels and picks. The navy flintlock pistols were there, of course, but they had been joined by some heavier artillery: a blunderbuss with folding bayonet and an army .50-caliber smoothbore musket. Both, he saw upon closer examination, primed and powdered. And next to them, wrapped in oilcloth, a ten-pound shank of pork and a wooden box filled with dead fish.
“What the hell, Sammy? Are we having ourselves a picnic tonight or are we fighting a war?”
Clow laughed. “The guns is to protect ourselves with. I’m thinking that blunderbuss can kill quite a few rats, its shot packed with tiny nails as it is. And the food? Well, don’t be handling it without gloves, for there’s enough strychnine in them goodies to kill a hundred men and mayhap a colony of evil rats.”
Without further ado, Clow outlined his plan, which he thought was a good one. They were going to the North Grounds to fish out the body of a handsome young girl who had succumbed to a gas leak, been found dead in the morning by her mother. That was what they were going to do. Dr. Gray would be very happy at such a fine and healthy specimen of eighteen years without a spot of damage. And if while they were there, this ravenous colony of rats showed, they would give them a taste of ball and powder, send ’em running.
“And if we find some of them burrows under the ground? Why, we’re going to set out our bait and kill the bastards and their brood.”
Kierney thought about it. “It sounds a fair plan and surely I’m game.”
“Me uncle Roy said they did it out to Ramshorn,” Clow told him. “Them rats he spoke of…a horrid and foul throng they were. They infested the burial grounds, overrunning not only the aboveground vaults and crypts, but literally honeycombing the earth itself with their tunnels, chewing their way into boxes, and devouring the corpses. Oh, a profanity it surely was.”
“And they poisoned them?”
“Aye, it was the only way. Great sections of the graveyard were collapsing from all that digging going on beneath.” Clow pulled at his wipe. “By this point, why, the sextons and caretakers were not above employing anyone who could help. So they turned to the resurrectionists. And old Uncle Roy? Did he help them? Why, sure he did. He right away knew what to do.”
“Baiting them?”
“Aye, but just not baiting them like any old rat catcher, but baiting them with what they loved best…corpses. Dozens of corpses injected full of poison. The rats got to ’em, and in the following weeks, no more rats.”
Kierney shook his head. “Is this a true story?”
“Why, sure it is.”
“Aye, but at the Glasgow High Churchyard, Sammy, no rats burrowed into that mausoleum…no rats made a burrow like that. It were something else.”
“Well, then,” Clow said, “perhaps tonight we’ll find out what.”
15
The North Burial Grounds was a city of the dead.
Soon as you came through the gates you saw that. In every which direction, tombs. High and low, set into mounds and atop hills. Some were gray and crumbling and covered in wild ivies and vines, sinking into the moist earth, and others stood tall and white and pristine. And between them, slabs and obelisks and marble crosses, intensely crowded gravestones and narrow peaked monuments. Here were dark gray headboard-shaped tombstones with weeping angels and winged death’s heads. Rectangular stones set with rosettes, spades, and hourglasses. And among them, ornate limestone ovals and tall slate half-ovals embellished with skulls and serpents and half-moons. And all of it lorded over by death angels spreading their marble wings and tall, brooding skeletons gripping scythes, their skull faces threaded in cobweb and grave fungi.
“Very quiet,” Kierney said as Clem pulled them through the snaking roads and between stands of craggy black oaks. “Just the way I like it.”
There was a wind, and it was especially chilly here. The trees were stripped of foliage, the byways and footpaths plastered with wet leaves.
“Just ahead,” Clow said, “near to the pauper’s field.”
They both kept an eye out for the Churchyard Watch but saw nothing that concerned them. They passed a silent watchtower and it was dark, festooned with creeping shadows, lifeless as the burial yard itself. Clow reined Old Clem to a stop beneath a pool thrown by interlocking tree branches above.
“Now to business,” he said, his breath frosting in the chill air.
They meandered through the gardens of stones and around leaf-blown sepulchers, pausing at a morbid winged seraph that was very old, its features worn and indistinct. Clow, gripping a spade and pick, sniffed the air for the scent of fresh earth and found it
nearly right away. Just on the other side of a wild expanse of bushes shivering in the wind.
“Here she is,” he said, sighting a fresh headstone. “Here’s our girl.”
Kierney brushed leaves away from the grave, tossed aside a funeral wreath, wound his scarf tighter around his throat, and set his hat atop a pointed monument. “Well, me love, we’ll get ye out of that awful place and quick we will.”
He rubbed his hands together to drive the cold out and spread the tarp next to the grave. He pulled on his dirty apron. Then, spade in hand, he began to dig. The ground was very loose, only lightly packed by feet stomping about. It took him about ten minutes to square off the upper half of the grave, dumping clods of earth onto the stretched tarp. Then the real digging began. Since they had Clem with them, it would be necessary to expose only the top of the coffin. Then they could snap the lid and fish their treasure out.
They worked in shifts, first Kierney digging feverishly and expertly while Clow kept watch. When he was down three feet, Clow took over. When he reached the lid and brushed away the dirt, exalting as always in the rich smell of soil, he climbed up out of the grave.
“Make ready, Mickey. I’ll bring Clem around.”
Kierney tossed aside his coat and jumped down into the grave, inserting the broad hooks firmly beneath the lid, arranging the sacking to muffle the sound of the cracking. The casket shifted beneath his weight, but he thought nothing of it. He waited for Clow. Through that cramped opening above, he could see the denuded tree branches scraping together beneath the eye of the moon. A gust pushed leaves up into the air and dozens of them settled down into the grave.
Finally Clow arrived and tossed down the ropes.
It took them less than five minutes to secure the lines to Old Clem’s harness. Then they walked the big draft horse and the ropes pulled tight and with barely any exertion, the upper lid snapped with hardly a discernible noise. Kierney jumped down, undid the hooks, and tossed the sacking up. He pushed aside the fragments of the casket and saw the young lady within.
Even in the moonlight, she was attractive, he decided. Her cheekbones were high, her lips full, her face framed by flowing red hair. “Oi, she’s a beauty, she is. Old Dr. Gray, that buggering pervert, he’ll fall straight in love.”
Often, to quicken things, the rope was noosed around the throat and the body fished up roughly. But this girl was in perfect condition and they didn’t want to damage her. Kierney lifted her up as far as he could and looped the rope under both of her arms, making a tight sling.
“Quit romancing her, ye sick bastard,” Clow said. “I’m freezing me balls off up here.”
“Not much warmer down here, I’m saying to ye. In fact, it’s—”
The words dried up in his throat. The coffin shifted beneath him. First this way, then that. It trembled and sank down deeper an inch or two.
“What? What the hell is it?”
“The box,” Kierney cried out of the hole. “It…it’s moving…I’m coming out.”
He scrambled to his feet, taking the ends of the rope with him. He tossed them up to Clow, started pulling himself out, and then, beneath him, the coffin shuddered…and dropped. Kierney went with it.
Clow was hanging over the edge of the grave, seeing the deep opening below. “Mickey? Mickey? Are ye well?”
“Fuck,” Kierney called up to him. “Bloody fuck…I’m in one of them burrows. Drop me rope, drop me a fucking rope, ye hear?”
Clow threw a line down there, felt it tighten as Kierney gripped it. “Are ye coming?”
There was a flickering light from below and Clow realized he had struck a match down there.
“Sammy?” he called up. “Bring yonder the guns and the lantern. There’s work to be done.”
Clow wasn’t liking it much. The idea of descending into that subterranean lair made his flesh creep and his guts roll over, but if Kierney was down there and not frightened…how bad could it be? He lit the lantern, tied a rope to the handle, and lowered it below. Then dropped down the pistols and rifles, the poisoned meat and fish. Then he went, shimmying down the rope like a monkey down a grapevine.
The stink was the first thing he became aware of as his feet struck the top of the coffin below. It was a mephitic stench like warm and gas-blown things dragged from rivers. It was the stink of death and corruption, of course, but beneath it there was something even worse…something monstrously alive.
“Oi, must be awful big, these fucking rats of yours, Sammy,” Kierney said, wedging one of the flintlock pistols through the belt that held up his pants. “Not thinking I wish to be here when they come home. Not at all, says I.”
Clow hopped down off the casket, took one of the pistols and then the lantern from Kierney. The bottom of the grave was about seven feet up, the stars and fresh air another six above that. The burrow they were in was nearly perfectly round and big enough to stand up in. Some work had gone into excavating it; there was no doubt of that. It ran off into the darkness behind them, splitting off into two separate tunnels that were considerably smaller. Ahead of them, just a single passage, the roof of which sloped downward.
Clow did not like this place.
It made him feel claustrophobic and dirty, his throat scratchy. Everything was close, pressing in, constricting. There was about a half-inch of slimy water on the floor. The musty reek of carrion and that high, sickening air itself made something in his brain flinch, filled his mind with writhing maggots. He believed that he knew what it must be like to be buried alive.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” Kierney said.
“Aye, if yer a corpse worm or a graveyard rat.”
Clow stuffed the pistol through his belt as Kierney had done, took up the musket. “Well, should we do a wee bit of exploring, old friend?”
“Not to me liking, but if you say.” Kierney picked up the blunderbuss and the box of poisoned fish. “Let’s bait these bastards. Spread these fish about into the tunnel, leave the meat here.”
Clow nodded, leading them forward.
Within ten feet, the floor became increasingly muddy…soft and swampy. Their brogans sank right up to the ankles in spots. The roof sloped ever downward and the walls narrowed, clots of rank earth dropping all around them. They had to move at a crouch now, breathing hard, perspiring and shaking and expecting God only knew what. The walls of the passage were slimy and sweating black water that stank like the runoff of corpses. Colonies of bloated, fleshy mushrooms sprouted from crevices. It was like being in some stinking, elongated grave. The main passage kept branching off into arteries…much smaller, yet certainly large enough for a man.
“Listen,” Kierney said.
Clow heard it, all right: the skitter and squeaking of rats. Many, many rats. Now was the time to turn back, to leave the rest of this horror to the imagination. There would be plenty of nights and plenty of pints over which to fill in the blanks of what lay ahead. Yet…he did not honestly want to turn back. Going forward was sheer madness, but he wanted to. He wanted to see what this was all about. Sure, there were rats ahead and probably behind, too. But it was not possible for them to have carved out this labyrinth. Something else had.
And he wanted to see it.
They came to a large passage that led away down, down. It was big enough for a man, of course, but neither of them were going down there. Clow held the lantern in there. In the distance, he could make out something like a chamber or pit and what seemed to be hundreds and hundreds of greasy, plump furry bodies filling it up. Thousands of beady eyes were reflected pink and shining in the light.
“Rats,” Clow said. “A den of ’em.”
He took the box from Kierney and opened the lid, tossing the whole thing down the tunnel. It tumbled end over end, spilling dead fish. The rats scattered, swarming around, a few daring individuals moving stealthily up the tunnel.
“Aye, I’ve had me fill,” Kierney said. “Let’s get back up where we can breathe.”
Clow nodded. It was enough.
> He was breathing very fast, he realized, like the air had gone bad and he was slowly suffocating. It was more than just the air, though, but the idea that if there were all these burrows, there might be burrows beneath them, too. That at any moment, the floor might give away and drop them below, from where there would be no escape.
“Ahead…what’s that?” Kierney said.
They moved forward and the tunnel opened up into something like a room. There were bones scattered everywhere, all of them nibbled and set with teeth marks. Some had been snapped right in half, as if by huge jaws.
Clow panned the light about.
He saw skulls and rib cages, shiny white femurs and ulnas. Mummified cadavers were tangled in rotting cerements. There were shattered caskets, too, some of them crushed to kindling, others broken open…mildewed satin linings hanging out like guts. A few skeletons were embedded right into the muddy walls as if they were trying to climb out.
Kierney kept trying to lick his lips. “Sammy…lookit this…this is where that Corpse King dumps its litter…all around us.”
Clow was holding the lantern up high, noticing that the roof went up and up until there was no roof. Just an oval passage that led right into a crypt. He could see arched beams and cement walls. Just like the vault they’d visited that awful night in Glasgow.
Yes, that’s right, Sammy. And you remember what was looking up at you as you looked down from above?
Kierney stepped among the decomposing bones and skulls threaded with fungi. He found the remains of fresher corpses…limbs and trunks, most badly worried. A complete cadaver was settled in the corner, a fine mesh of mildew growing over its face. Its head lolled at a sickening angle from the neck and its chest seemed to have been crushed. In fact, the entire body had been smashed with such pressure that viscera had been forced from its mouth. Beetles crawled all over it, tunneling into it.
“That…that face,” Kierney said. “I recognize it…it’s—”
Dark Screams, Volume 6 Page 15