Dark Screams, Volume 6

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

“Keith Strand,” Clow said. “He disappeared a few weeks back, maybe a month.”

  The stench of the chamber was roiling and hot and nauseating. Like sticking your face into the slit belly of a putrescent corpse…and inhaling. It was that revolting, that physically appalling.

  And you stay here much longer, Clow told himself, and you’ll know worse. You’ll know something much, much worse.

  He knew it to be true. For already the chamber and tunnel system was filling with a presence, a palpable sense of something immense and rancid and spiritually evil. It made his guts clench like a fist, bile squirt up the back of his throat.

  Kierney said, “I think we’d best be getting on our way, Sammy.”

  Clow was in complete agreement. The tunnel ahead sloped down and down, farther into the earth and maybe straight down into the bowels of hell, for all he knew. All he was certain of was that he honestly did not want to find out.

  About then the chamber began to vibrate. The walls shook and clots of earth began to fall around them as if a cave-in was beginning. The mucky, slopping ground under their feet thrummed as if a train was approaching.

  Yes, something was coming.

  Clow froze up, feeling the musket in his fists and wondering if he’d have the steel to use it when the time came. For surely, that time was coming. There was about to be a dire intersection of fates—theirs and that of the thing that crawled beneath graveyards.

  Kierney muttered something.

  The sound was getting louder, the tunnel vibrating so wildly now they could barely stay on their feet. Earth was dropping all around them. A skull dislodged itself from above and conked Kierney on the head. But it did not faze him. Nothing could touch either of them, they were too transfixed by that malignant other barreling through catacombs of rot and bones to get at them. Everything was trembling and canting, like an earth tremor was rising and rising from far below.

  Kierney grabbed Clow by the arm and, together, they ran.

  It took them not even five minutes to make it back to the dangling rope that Clow had tied off above, but it seemed an eternity with the ground shaking and that roaring, screeching noise behind them as the thing got closer and closer.

  “Up the rope, Sammy!” Kierney said.

  But as terrified as Clow was, he would not hear of it. “Ye first and right now, ye silly git!”

  Kierney took one last look at his old friend and jumped on the rope, moving up it quickly and into the grave. Clow set the lantern at his feet, that roaring having become deafening now. Oh, yes, it was certainly coming and something in him died at the idea of facing it. It pushed a hot wave of putrefaction before it like warm, spoiled meat. And he heard other things…a clicking and a slithering, a dry rustling and a moist undulation. Whatever the Corpse King was, it was many things joined in a lurid danse macabre.

  “Sammy! Up the rope!” Kierney called from above. “Do ye hear me? Up the fucking rope, ye ripe bastard!”

  Clow heard him, all right.

  But he could not move.

  He brought the smoothbore musket up, his fingers oily on it. In the distance, in the flickering light of the lantern, he could make out a huge, rising swell rolling in his direction. Something that chattered a thousand teeth like roofing nails and clattered a million yellowed bones…

  He saw two brilliant red eyes.

  He fired the musket and the report was deafening, overwhelming. The muzzle flash saved him, though, for it blinded him to what came slinking and coiling out of the tunnel, something that would have driven him stark, screaming mad.

  “Sammy!”

  Clow was on the rope, sliding right up it, afraid that he would lose his grip and fall into the easy grasp of that noxious, undulating nightmare. But he did make it up, and once in the grave itself, Kierney’s strong hands yanked him up into the air and the world itself.

  And then they were running, finding Old Clem and hooking that wagon up quicker than they thought was possible.

  All around them, the cemetery was quaking and rolling, stones falling and crypts swaying, tree limbs falling everywhere. They raced out of the boneyard, a row of graves collapsing as the thing rocketed through the earth trying to catch them.

  But once again, they made it.

  “Never, ever again,” Kierney panted ten minutes later, “will we go into that cursed place.”

  And to that, Clow could only silently agree.

  16

  But it was a lie and Clow well knew it.

  Maybe Kierney could not see that or feel it down into his bones, but Clow did. Because, sooner or later, they would need to make a snatch, and if what they needed wasn’t available elsewhere, then they would follow the trail of money back to the North Grounds.

  They wouldn’t have been the first.

  For maybe Johnny Sherily with so many years sprawled lazily behind him and so much wisdom bottled and corked on the crowded shelves of his brain could turn his back on greed, but he was a rarity. There were few in the business that did not despise the handling of the dead, but they did it again and again for the money, for the pounds and pence and the easy, high life such things provided. Sometimes the work was dirty and despicable and downright sickening, but the money brought them back again and again. Just as it brought diggers back to the North Grounds even when they knew it was the lair of the corpse-eater.

  The next afternoon, whiling away these thoughts, Clow walked with Kierney through the narrow wynds and closes of Old Town. The streets were noisy and bustling with carriages and livestock, horses and barking dogs, barrows and stray pigs. Children dodged about barefoot, trying to pick the pockets of merchants or simply chasing hoops about. Soldiers in red tunics chatted with prostitutes. Drunken women lounged in doorways, bawling dirty children at their feet. Traders were selling bread and pork and fish, turnips and potatoes. The cobbles were gray with horseshit, bits of straw, and standing pools of water. A couple girls selling flowers were splashed with mud by a passing hansom, and Clow and Kierney laughed. For straightaway they were no longer little angels but foul-mouthed creatures insinuating that the driver’s mother had lain with barnyard stock to produce something like him.

  “It were some night we had ourselves, weren’t it, Mickey?” Clow said.

  “Oi, I would call it a horrible night.” He shook his head. “Never will ye drag me to the North Grounds again.”

  They walked in silence until they reached the brick archway that led to the close where the Seven Keys was to be found. You could not see the sky overhead, so much washing was strung between the high buildings.

  Clow sighed. “What do you suppose it is, Mickey? A beasty? A boggle? A devil from hell?”

  Kierney spit tobacco juice at a couple children panhandling. “Aye, all that and neither. I was thinking on it, since the bastard has stolen away me sleep again, and I think that this Corpse King is all that which a graveyard could be. Do ye follow me on this? He is graves and worms, corpses and rot, slime and shrouds and rats and mourning and grief…all of that stirred up in a big greasy black pot, simmered and steamed. And when the lid comes off that foul mess, well, then you’ve got our Corpse King. Something not dead but not alive. A hunger and an evil and a misting black death.”

  Clow liked that.

  He’d been thinking along those same lines. For if you left a dead dog to silently rot in the gutter, it drew flies and worms and crawly things, did it not? And couldn’t that be applied to the graveyards of men? That sooner or later, with all that rancid beef lying about, something would be drawn? Something would be generated? Something would be born in those dark, stinking depths, something with teeth and a mortuary appetite?

  The idea of this had been growing in his mind for a long time, that places of death were also places of fungous, seething life. Maybe it took a corpse-grabber or a death-fisher to see it, to understand the verminous organic vitality that existed down in the tombs and hollows and catacombs. For it was there…the rank moisture and gassy heat and bubbling putrefaction. That
while aboveground mourners walked with stiff hide masks for faces and black holes for eyes…and as the grave robbers and resurrection men followed in wakes of human ash and grave-filth with shovels in their hands…down below, there was a great putrefying womb steaming with corpse-drainage and carrion and floral decay and it was only a matter of time before that womb expelled some unspeakable creeping embryo born of dripping tombs and rotting coffins.

  And now it had happened.

  Or perhaps the Corpse King had been birthed centuries before, slinking through Roman death house or Celtic bone pile or Gaelic excarnation chamber where the flesh was allowed to rot from the dead so that the skeleton could be worshipped. Perhaps it had existed that long or longer or maybe it was just the graven, sepulchral progeny of such things.

  Who could say?

  Regardless, in some arcane and mystical way, Clow had been waiting for such a thing to make an appearance. And now that it had, he felt that his fate was somehow tied to its own.

  That in the end, he would know the charnel embrace of the Corpse King.

  17

  Dr. Gray said he had need of a young woman, preferably in her early twenties or late teens, for a demonstration of female reproductive anatomy. Clow was only too happy to oblige. Within a few days, he found what he was looking for at St. Martin’s Cemetery. A heavy, cumbersome mortstone had been placed over the grave, and it took all of two hours to move it aside sufficiently to get at the grave.

  “Oi, me back,” Kierney said when they were finished. “If you would be so kind as to pull them nails out…right into me spine, they are.”

  Clow said, “I feel ’em, too, but mine are spikes what from the railroad.”

  “Did I say nails? Skewers is what they are, a baker’s dozen right in me back, driven through with a hammer.”

  They sat on a nearby slab and had themselves a pipe and a touch of rum. The night had gone chill and dark, the moon lodged in a bank of feathery caliginous clouds the color of coal dust. St. Martin’s was a hilly run of close-packed headstones, leaning this way and that, riding the hills like squat, flattened fence posts. The last time they had been here, some weeks before, they discovered a group of resurrectionists already digging. Tonight, they were alone.

  They knew they had a job ahead of them. The Churchyard Watch was out in such numbers that it was too dangerous to bring the horse and buckboard with them. So they would have break open the coffin themselves, then cart the body away on foot. No easy nor enjoyable matter on a damp, cold night where the wind went right through a man.

  “On with it, then,” Clow said.

  They started digging. St. Martin’s was no different from any dozen other graveyards in the area—saturated. The rains had come again, washing the last of the autumn color from the trees and leaving the world gray and leaden. The soil was wet and heavy, like shoveling mud. It was very slow going and they worked in shifts. Each square foot of earth was a labor that drove those nails and spikes deeper into their backs and by the time they struck the box, Kierney could barely straighten up.

  “If, six months from now,” he said, leaning against his spade, “you should find me on some street corner, hunched over and broken, selling flowers, trouble yourself not about it, Samuel Clow. For I bear you no ill will for breaking me fucking back.”

  “Kind of you, I say.”

  “It’s the way I am,” Kierney said as Clow scraped away the dirt from the upper third of the coffin lid. “All me life I’ve had a soft heart. It’s been me downfall, me charitable and God-fearing ways.”

  “Aye, that it has.”

  Clow secured the hooks and they took the ropes and began pulling and yanking, straining and swearing. Shrouded in sackcloth as usual, the lid gave only a dull report as it went. Like a snapped board heard miles distant. Clow cleaned the splinters away and, together, they began to drag the body up and up. The lady was wrapped up snugly in her moist cerements and it took some doing to get her up and out of that box.

  “Let’s have a look,” Kierney said, pulling his penknife and preparing to slit the cerecloth.

  “Aye, we should—”

  “You, there!” a voice cried out. “Grave robbers! You halt right now and stop what you’re doing!”

  Before either of them could do much but turn and look, a figure dashed in their direction with a lantern held high. Kierney stood and a shot rang out like thunder in those silent environs. He made a choking sound and folded up without another noise. The watchman got in close and Clow brought the blade of his shovel down on the man’s head. When he found the ground, Clow kept at it until his head was nearly split like a gourd.

  He gave the dead man a kick. “What’s that, guv? Tired, are you? Prefer to lay and take a nap? That’s fine, just fine.” He went down on his knees by Kierney, pulled his old friend up, saw the twin streams of blood running down his chin, the wetness at his chest. In the dappled lantern light, he could see that Kierney’s eyes were open. “All right, love, all right, let’s have none of that, now, shall we? Can you speak? Can you tell me…oh, dear Christ, Mickey Kierney, not this, you’re not doing this to me, are you? You’re not leaving me alone now, for I wouldn’t know what to do without you, oh, give us a wink or a smile, oh, Mickey, oh, my friend, oh, not this…”

  Clow had to leave him.

  Others were coming…and in numbers.

  He took their tools and threw the bundled-up woman over his shoulder and stalked off into the night. He left more behind than Kierney’s cooling remains, but a good part of his heart and soul and so many things he would never properly know.

  Then the night had him and from his own throat he heard a wracked sobbing.

  18

  It was later and Clow was drunk and in a foul mood.

  Soon as he stepped in the door of the Seven Keys, he heard his mother’s voice calling to him. He was not in the mood. Not in the mood for anything at that point, and the old cow should have known it by the look on his face. But she was well into her cups, and sensitivity was not among her natural rhythms.

  Looking upon her, he hated.

  And somehow, yes, he blamed the old witch for the dire event his life had become through the years. Yes, he looked upon her, and she was everything he had endured, everything he had missed or wanted and been denied. She was the cancer of his existence that had been chewing a hole through his belly from day one.

  “What the fuck ye looking at, ye great scab?” she said to him.

  Clow laughed.

  And kept laughing.

  He was remembering their flat as a boy after his father had gone. The two stinking rooms, his sisters and he living off crusts of bread and turnip tops while his mother drank the money she lifted her skirts for. He could see the flat, the narrow bed he shared with his sisters, feel the coarse sheets and the bite of the bugs that infested the mattress, hear his mother’s squeals and groans from the other room. He could smell the woodsmoke and mildew, feel the creeping dampness and see the cracked plaster and the fine layer of black soot that lay over everything. Overflowing piss buckets. Dead rats under the beds and in the cupboards. The stink of the clogged sewers below and the public well that seeped gray water. He could feel the cold rain dripping through holes in the roof and smell the fevers of his sisters, hear them coughing out wads of phlegm and blood. The rats scratching in the walls. He could see his sisters’ dirty, scabbed feet, feel the badly worn clothes he wore that the other children laughed at. Yes, that was his life as a boy. Always hungry, always tired, always sick and hurting. Watching his siblings sicken and die, one after the other.

  And what was the one constant in that hell? What was the poison that never stopped burning in his guts?

  Clow wiped a tear from his eye. “Hello, me mother,” he managed.

  “And what vile sewer have you come crawling from, Sammy Clow?” the widow asked him, spitting on the floor at the sight of him. “You’ve got the Devil’s own mark upon you and the stink of corpses and mortuaries, you do. Out stealing babies
from cold wombs, were you? Aye, what graves have you been a-rifling this night, you disgusting worm, you wriggling bit of slug that calls himself a man?”

  Clow stared at her, kept staring. Something in him went with a wet snap and then his eyes were bright and he was grinning like a slavering dog. “Why, only the one grave, me dear sweet whore of a mother, only the one.” He crossed behind her, helped himself to her gin and she let fly a string of expletives, but all he could do was laugh.

  “Oh, me mother, how could you be so cold and callous this night? How could that be? Is there no warmth in your heart, eh? No warmth in that cold clot of heart for your son? And me losing me chum and mate, me best friend Mickey Kierney—”

  “Trash, refuse, garbage! Drainage, nothing but a foul drainage! Vile and disgusting bastard, he was. A man like him belongs in a prison or a workhouse, in a cage with the rest of his kind, smarmy and repellent ass that he was—”

  Clow laughed and tears flowed from his eyes. “Oh, he was all them things, I reckon, and possibly a few more, and I loved him like me brother and still do, only more so now. But, aye, I robbed only the one grave this night and look what I found for you, Mum. Cor, it’s a pretty necklace, and see how it fits round your throat and holds tight, so very tight. Like a queen or high lady you are now, oh, don’t try and speak, don’t try and do nothing…aye, that’s a girl, go quiet, now, go quiet…lovely is your throat and purple is your face…go quiet, as ye should have a long time ago…oh, me poor dear mother…a rest for ye now…a long rest, ye filthy whore…”

  19

  The next week was difficult for Samuel Clow.

  Whatever had kept him going so long in that dim, despairing city bled out of him like blood and what was left was something that walked and drank, but did not smile nor emote. He saw the city, finally, as it truly was…a diseased carcass spilling a rotting green bile to the streets that infected all who lived and survived those filthy wynds and dark-smelling closes. Drunken mothers and starving children, gin-drowsy babies and thieves and pickpockets, swindlers and whores. A great seething stew of rot boiling into a sickening miasma and dying, dying every day. Workhouses and prisons, plagues and infirmity and violent death. And vermin. Always the rats and flies and slat-thin dogs picking away at what red meat was left on the emaciated corpse of the Old Town slums.