Yes, the city was decaying and sickened and he with it, crouching behind damp stone walls and in narrow alleyways. If he closed his eyes, he could hear the rumble of its empty belly and the tubercular wheeze of its lungs, smell the rotting houses and backed-up cisterns, the filth and the garbage and the putrefying human refuse. All around him, the city creaked and settled and rattled like the bones of a dying old man.
Clow stayed away from the Sign of the Boar and the Hogshead Inn and those other dens of the body-snatchers. Kierney’s body had been found, he knew, and it was no secret what he had been doing when he was shot down that night. So Clow stayed away and gravitated toward the beggars on the High Street. He lost himself in their numbers, swam in that sea of lice and filth that was their birthright. They accepted and did not question. There were hundreds of them crowded into just a few blocks, dirty and wrapped in rags, boasting sores and disfigurements and bleeding scalps, leprous fingers always scratching and working for coin. Some had been disfigured in wars, others in industrial accidents. But to a man and woman, they were all the same. They had all suffered and Clow felt that he belonged with them. They accepted him. All those Shivering Jemmys and fingerless pickpockets, rawboned Judies blind from grain alcohol and syphilitic haybags whose minds had finally curdled into a yellow mush. Together, then, a few old and crippled grave robbers among them, they huddled in the slimy byways of the rookery and worked the shallow, hungry, always hungry.
Now and again, a fine square-rigged gentlemen would come by and hold out a few shillings, wanting to know what happened to Clow, what his malady was. So he would weave him a fine and randy tale of graves and bodies snatched and a fine friend shot down in his prime, and of that other, that malefic corpse-fisher that haunted the bone-strewn catacombs of the burial grounds to the east and west and, yes, especially the north.
“Poor devil is mad,” they would say and drop a bit of silver in his cup.
With the beggars, he watched the fine girls and boys making for church on Sunday morning, refusing to look upon him and his kin. Some of them picked at steaming beef pies bought from the pie man and that which they didn’t eat, they tossed to the dogs rather than the wretched human waste crying out for food and coin. Even the cat-meat man and ragpickers avoided them.
Clow had buried himself in the dung of the city, but the city itself kept moving along, grinding away.
And eventually, tired of it all, he had to go back to work.
The Seven Keys was out of the question, for the police learned soon enough who Mickey Kierney’s partner in crime was. In the streets and dark, stinking closes, they were waiting for him, waiting to have a word with him and Clow was thinking that conversation might just end with a short drop and a fine hemp noose for the member of the Churchyard Watch he had happily put down.
But work there was, so he found new digs. Damp and dirty and gaslit, a few diseased and buggy sheets to cover himself with. At night, trembling with fear of whispers and footsteps on the landing, he would peer out his dirty windows, study the intricate clockwork of the slums themselves. Everything down there was grim and gray and degenerating. He could see the high ragged towers of the tenements, the leaning houses crowded between, jagged roofs and crumbling walls and smoky lanes cut through them.
And one night, too afraid to go out himself, he saw a couple men dragging a cart through the moonlit streets. Grave robbers, resurrectionists…Yes, it could have been Kierney and he. And it was, just a few weeks before.
And this, more than anything, made him go out and earn a living. Because he knew what he was and what he would always be: a thing of shadows and cellars that slipped out by night to exhume corpses. A graveyard rat he was.
One that waited for the cemetery dirge of the Corpse King to call him into oozing graveyard depths and put him to bed with a clammy midnight kiss.
Orders were coming in and what he needed was at the North Burial Grounds.
So he began to make plans.
20
That afternoon, he paid Mickey Kierney a visit.
The day had gone unseasonably warm. Old Mickey was over to the Canongate Tolbooth, the city gaol. Clow went there, knowing he was taking an awful chance that the police might see him, might recognize him, throw him in irons and be done with the whole mess. But still he went, his badly worn John Bull hat pulled down low over his eyes. He had to see Mickey one last time, and no peelers or bailies were going to stop him. Maybe he was waltzing happily into their arms and maybe part of him wanted it that way.
He moved with the crowd that had come to gawk and stare.
The tolbooth was an imposing five-story building assembled from dirty brick with high turreted steeples overhead. The gaol itself was in the cellars of the tolbooth and through rusting gratings set near the very tops of the cells which looked out at street level, you could hear men screaming in the dank darkness below.
Clow moved with the others beneath the arches and into the courtyard, where he found Mickey dangling in a rising mist of flies, receiving all visitors and at all hours. A law had been passed in 1751 that decreed that all murderers and grave robbers should either be publicly dissected or hung in chains. And for Mickey Kierney, it was the latter.
It wasn’t hard finding him.
You just had to follow your nose.
For invariably the stink of rank corruption would lead you to Gibbet Row. And as Clow stood there among those hanging cages, his stomach in his throat, the people came and went but rarely lingered…the gawkers and onlookers and the morbidly curious. They spilled from rooming houses and pubs and mills, from hearthside and fish stall and New Town office. Working men in leather aprons, muddy brogans, and threadbare open-weave jackets. Rich men in shiny tailcoats and white breeches and jeweled waistcoats. Street women stinking of gin in ratty calico and woolen skirts. Little boys in skeleton suits, silk stockings, and breeches. Fine ladies in silk dresses pressing perfumed handkerchiefs to their delicate noses. Little girls in lace bonnets and plaid tams, sobbing at the smell. Yes, they all came to see the meat hung in the gibbets, to look upon horror and give warning to their children of the fate that waited those who broke the King’s laws.
Clow stood behind an old man in a soft mulberry coat the color of ripe plums. The man held the hand of a little boy, making the child look at what was in those suspended cages.
“What did that one do?” the boy asked.
The old man paused with his snuffbox in hand. “Eh? That one? Nothing but a filthy grave robber.”
They moved on, but Clow just stood there, feeling sick and angry and terribly alone. There were some six others gibbeted, but Clow only saw Mickey, his old and dear friend.
The gibbet was no simple cage but a carefully engineered device to display the dead in an upright position or to bring a slow and agonizing death to the condemned. Around the torso was a cage of riveted hoops and uprights, the head enclosed in a similar device, the neck manacled in place so the head could not dangle too far to either side. Iron rings and bars encircled and supported the legs, and at the lower extremity of these were circular plates for the feet to rest on. Set into the bottom of each of these were iron spikes that were inserted into the soles of the corpse’s feet…and if you were put in there alive, to starve slowly to death as many were, the spikes would slowly pierce your feet as your own body weight settled down upon them. The wrists and ankles were manacled and chained into place so as the body decomposed, it could not collapse.
This then was the gibbet, a cage hung six or seven feet in the air, for young and old to marvel at.
Criminals had been gibbeted alive and dead, left in the cages sometimes for years to slowly mummify in the elements. Sometimes the gibbets were erected at crossroads or atop cliffs overlooking the sea. Especially cruel methods were often employed for those hung in chains while alive…a loaf of bread might be dangled just outside the cage, but a metal spike pressed against the throat of the condemned so that if they dared moved toward the bread, the spike would punctu
re their throat. Hundreds of criminals starved slowly in the Edinburgh gibbets through the centuries. If their crimes were particularly offensive—like witchcraft or heresy—they might be cut down, disemboweled with hooks, entrails burned, and body quartered…each quarter hung at a different crossroads as a warning. Mostly, it was corpses placed in the gibbet. Sometimes they were left until they rotted away or the insects picked them clean.
And this, Clow knew with a sinking heart, was to be Mickey Kierney’s fate.
A wetness misting his eyes, Clow coughed into his handkerchief, turning away from Mickey and appraising the other poor souls in the hanging cages. Four men and one woman, all dangling in those horrible contraptions, cadaverous bird-picked faces leering with empty sockets and screaming with sprung jaws, all suspended in a hot, fetid flow of decomposition. They were nests of flies and baskets of writhing maggots. Wilted and rawboned scarecrows worried by vermin, made of bamboo and reed and discolored straw, their stuffing hanging out in decaying spirals, graveyard ribbons that tattered in the breeze. They were bloated and decompressed sculptures welded together from rungs of polished white bone that had burst through their fading canvas hides, revealing seams of yellow fat and pink meaty gizzard and looping pockets of graveworms. Their blackening flesh had gone to a warm, bubbling wax, melting to a green and gray flyspecked tallow.
And, dear God, the vermin.
The cages were speckled white from bird droppings. Rooks and crows and ravens perched atop the gibbets, plucking out eyes and strips of red meat, worrying skin from sallow faces and graying lips from mouths. They fed on the carrion in the cages and the worms busy tunneling within. As they darted into feed, huge buzzing clouds of meatflies lifted and descended again to eat and mate and lay their eggs. The bodies dripped black bile and a waxy corpse ooze, bits of them flaking off and dropping to the ground below where the ants and beetles had gathered by the thousands in a creeping, living carpet.
As a final indignity, the cadavers in the cages had been pelted by rotting fruit, even though the guards were supposed to discourage this. But mostly they just turned away, offended that they had to spend the day with rank gibbeted carrion.
Kierney had been there a week—the freshest of the lot—and already his face was meatless, his eyes gone. His body moved in a slow and sickening undulation from the activity of the worms within.
Clow did not want to look upon his old friend in any detail, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.
Standing there, the crowd moving off, he said, “I got the ripe bastard what done this to ye, Mickey. Certain, I did. I believe he died knowing a fierce agony.”
But if Kierney had anything to say, he kept quiet about it, dangling there in his riveted cage while the crawling things and pecking things kept at him, making him shudder and jerk.
Although Clow knew it was Kierney from the hair atop his head and the rags of his clothes, it was hard to believe that this thing was indeed his old mate. He hung there in the gibbet, a gruesome freakshow dummy cut from dirty ice and seamed rubber, his corpse grin like a sickle. Maybe it wasn’t Mickey at all but just something made of gray corpse fat that had been pressed into a mold, a husk and a wraith and a stew of rot intended to scare the kiddies.
Clow wasn’t sure how long he’d stood there, but soon enough, it seemed, the shadows had grown long and the guards were eyeing him suspiciously and a pale moon began to rise. He would have stood there all night, but the guards tired of him and tossed him back through the arches onto the wet cobbles of the Canongate. In the moonlight, a horse and wagon pulled up.
“Ye there,” said the old man in the high seat. “Ye best climb aboard.”
Clow, still sitting in the damp, saw Johnny Sherily at the reins, lean and strong, his white hair whipping about him in the breeze. He got up into the wagon and Sherily pulled away instantly, tipping his hat to the guards.
“None too bright ye are, Sammy Clow,” Sherily said. “Whatever possessed ye to be coming to the tolbooth? Lucky ye were they did not recognize ye, for them peelers is all a-hunting ye. Aye, poor old Mickey was the bait and ye came right for it, ye silly git. Lucky them police are just plain stupid.”
Clow licked his lips, tried to breathe warmth into his cupped hands. “I…I had to see me mate one last time.”
“And so ye have and what of it?”
But Clow could not answer that question. Something had held him there, made him look at that ravaged corpse for hours and hours and he did not know what it was, but thought maybe it was his soul preparing him for the state he would soon be in.
21
There were lots of reasons not to go to the North Burial Grounds.
Clow would have needed more than ten fingers to count them all.
Maybe it was Johnny Sherily’s stories or maybe Mickey Kierney’s death, but it was not a place he wished to go. But business was business. He had been there countless times before, of course, but this night the burial ground was grim beyond belief. A wild and unkempt mutiny of crosses and stones, crumbling sepulchers and overgrown vaults, fallen tombstones and frost-heaved slabs. Dead flowers drooped from cracked stone urns. The sky had pissed rain and snow off and on all evening, and where things weren’t frosted white they were splashed with cold mud, great pools of gray ice-sheathed water lying in hollows and depressions. Battalions of markers and shafts rose from these leaf-covered ponds, buoys pointing out sunken graves and abyssal mysteries.
Spades, hooks, and rope in tow, Clow moved through the muck toward the rear of the cemetery where the chapel rose gray and morose like the tomb of some fallen god. A slight wind blew, rattling dark trees and scattering leaves and snow.
When he reached the pauper’s cemetery, he paused.
It was here the dead of all denominations were buried side by side. It was also here that the city fathers planted their charity cases. Their graves were lined up one next to the other like books on a shelf, simple stone markers, dates of death worn by the fingers of wind and rain. Weeds and blighted grasses sprawled unchecked.
Clow stood for some time under that black, starless sky, knowing he was alone and, yet, certain somehow that he was not. He was trying to get a feel for the place and what he was sensing, he did not like.
Maybe it was the air itself. It was impossibly heavy, leaden, palpable with a brooding sense of expectancy. It was swollen with moisture and edged by frost, yes, but it was more than that.
Nearby, now that he lit his lantern, Clow could see that a series of stones had been knocked flat, cast aside like dominoes as if something huge and nameless had pushed its way through there. He didn’t doubt it. Something had passed and in passing had slimed the stones with some black ichor, pressed aside the markers at weird angles, rent the very earth in jagged ruts from which a pestiferous blackness wormed and pooled. All around him the shadows seemed uneasy, warped, and shivering.
Beneath the shadow of the chapel, Clow began to dig, knowing instinctively by the look of the grave that he was in the right place. The soil was loose and his spade cleaved into it, tearing through the veil of earth that was the placental membrane of the charnel offspring below. The wind died out and there was an odd odor of spices and salts coming up from the ground. Moonlight washed over him as if the door to a lighted room had been swung open.
He reached the coffin, brushing aside a fat, coiling worm that inched over the surface. After some doing, he cracked open the lid and dragged the body up and out. No shroud this time. Just the corpse of a middle-aged man who had died of natural causes. His face was ashen and puckered, the lips drawn away from the narrow yellow teeth in a ghoulish grin. One eyelid was closed, the other half open, that dead eye staring and staring.
Clow was not superstitious, not even here, and even the grinning corpse and sinister aura of the place could not make him so. Maybe in the back of his mind there was fear of what haunted this place, but in the front there was only hunger and a need to get some coin in his pockets.
The ground was moving.
That’s what Clow noticed first.
It was a subtle motion as of respiration, as if something was breathing beneath him. It began to grow into a rumbling, shaking motion until the earth was heaving and moving like a ship in a storm. It spilled him on his ass. He nearly fell into the grave, and that’s when he saw that the hole he had opened had no bottom, that some barrow beneath had collapsed and he was staring straight down into some bottomless labyrinth.
Just like the last time he and Kierney had been there. The Corpse King was still active, and down there was its lair.
Clow didn’t hesitate.
He grabbed the corpse and almost got away, but a great heaving from below put him down again.
The ground was trembling madly, a roaring and thundering ringing out from far below, and there arose such a mephitic and noisome stench that he nearly vomited. It was the stink of a hundred burst caskets, a hundred wormy corpses, a gaseous reek of nitrous rot. Then, from the distance, he saw the rows of markers begin to…fall. Yes, a swath seven or eight feet in width was being cut through the headstones, they were scattering like dice. It was as if some invisible hand was pushing them aside and its path was coming straight at Clow.
But it was no hand, for it was coming from beneath the graveyard.
Some long and winding tunnel underneath was collapsing, sinking into itself, and the stones were sinking with it. Clow could see the earth rising and falling back again as if something huge was pushing its way toward him.
And it was.
As it hit the grave itself and sent Clow rolling, it surged up with a roiling, tenebrous motion.
Dark Screams, Volume 6 Page 17