And he saw it.
Saw it towering ten feet above him…a blasphemy.
The Corpse King.
It was like some huge and livid worm. Chitinous, segmented, more like an undulating spinal column than anything else. Some charnel god made of bones and sticks and graveyard mud, latticed with worms, crawling with centipedes and bloated black beetles, shrouded in ragged coffin silk. Its underbelly was made of skulls…dozens and dozens of them welded together. Yes, it was all crisscrossed bones and rungs of pitted rib threaded and sewn up with catgut, writhing hairs, and fanning ropes of cobweb that spread out thick and woolen like some hideous network of dead tissue.
Clow saw and was seen.
He pissed himself, something greasy crawling up the back of his throat. Though the Corpse King was vermiform in shape, there was a ladder of bone knotted with convoluted muscle and wiry ligament and atop it, a head. Yes, a grotesque exaggeration of a human skull, but the size of a barrel and made of spongy, rubbery flesh. It grinned down at Clow with interlocking teeth that were rapiers and mooring spikes.
He could not run.
He could not hide.
There was simply nothing he could do as his sanity bubbled in his brain and ran out his ears in a watery spill. He drooled and giggled, but there was little else. He clutched the disinterred corpse to him for comfort and watched the Corpse King slither closer, knowing that most of the creature was still under the ground. Grinning with bladelike teeth, looking down with lurid red eyes, a set of spidery limbs opened to either side of its wriggling body like fans. They were the width of broomsticks, long, jointed, and snared together by webs. They made a clicking sound as they wiggled and worked, anxious for solid ground to skitter on.
Clow realized it was like the sort of thing some anatomy student would throw together as a joke. Part skeleton and part insect and part worm. A gaseous, vaporous odor wafted from it. And it was all bad enough, this rattling, clattering, webby profusion of nightmare…but what it did next was worse.
It spoke.
With winds sucked from dusty catacombs and ossuaries, discordant screams and ghastly reverberations, it spoke and its breath was a hot, gritty blast from a crematorium: “Hand that over then…it belongs to me,” it said with a snake-like hissing. “There’s a love…”
Withered arms reached out to him, fingers that were skeletal and sharp, horned and netted with casket moss. They plucked the body from his grip. The cadaver singed and crisped where those fingers touched it, plumes of acrid smoke wafting off.
“We’ll have business together, Samuel Clow,” the Corpse King said, exhaling a storm of meat-flies, its breath like embalming fluid. “And soon…see if we don’t…”
Then with a nod of its skullish head, it slid back beneath the cemetery, the corpse clutched in its jaws, leaving nothing but a few graveworms writhing on the muddy ground.
Clow stood after a time, then carefully, cautiously, he ran and ran and ran. He did not fall, he did not waver. He just ran, accompanied by wet, chattering laughter echoing from subterranean burrows.
But he did escape.
22
He did not know how long it took him to reach the sullen, gaslit neighborhood of the Seven Keys. Sometimes he called out for Kierney before remembering he was dead, and other times he screamed when an undulant shadow crept in an alley or a slithering noise erupted from a sewer.
In the High Street, feverish and half mad, he scooped water from a public well and then vomited when it tasted of spoiled meat. Darkness was everywhere this night and he swam in it, bathed in it. The market stalls were closed and the shops shuttered. Drunken sailors tossed bottles at him and tawdry women lifted their tattered skirts to him, laughing and laughing. Sometimes he ran and sometimes he crawled on all fours like a beast. The cobbles were slimy with animal and human waste.
And above, always above, looking down was the glowering eye of the moon. Whenever Clow saw it, he screamed thinking it was the eye of the Corpse King.
And maybe it was.
He needed to get back to the Seven Keys, but sometimes he wasn’t sure where it was. So he darted down alleys heaped with rubbish, fought slavering dogs and fled from packs of skittering rats. He stumbled through gutters flowing with sewage and didn’t move quite fast enough when a chamber pot was emptied from above. Black and stinking, slinking like the vermin he had become, he ran and hid and giggled hysterically. When he saw two diggers pulling a dog cart, he shrieked like a lunatic.
But finally, he reached the archway that led to his close, to the Seven Keys.
He moved quietly, only mumbling softly to himself. The corpse of a man was sprawled at a doorstep, drowning in a pool of blood and vomit. The door of the public privy was swinging wide, the pit overflowing, the stench unbearable. The pigs had burst their pen and were rooting about in there, slopping up what they found. The Seven Keys was just ahead…nighted and looming. The stink of butchered hogs was ripe in the air…greasy carcasses and moist piles of entrails. Sewage in the gutter flowed past the steps. Men slept in their own vomit on the walks.
But finally, yes, he was home.
Down into the cellar he went, locking the door behind him, smelling his stock and liking it. It was some time before he dared light a single candle. And when he did he saw wreckage…someone or something had been in there, shattering vats and scattering bones and leaving a black slime in its passing.
And then Clow noticed the far wall.
A great hole had been eaten through it, a shadowy tunnel led away down into the earth.
Stifling a scream, Clow hid behind a cask of pickled babies, trembling.
He didn’t wait long. For soon enough a voice that was broken and deranged echoed out at him: “Oi, Sammy…tomorrow night I’d like something not too blown with gas and set with worms…something moist and chewy…Did ye hear me, Sammy? Eh, there’s a good lad, keep me belly full and ye’ll stay alive…”
23
The days passed in a sepulchral blur.
Clow did a lot of digging and a lot of snatching and the meat was always gladly taken. But it had to come screeching to an end sooner or later and then one rainy night, it did just that.
The police were waiting for him in their long coats and tall hats and dark badges when he got back to the cellar. They took hold of him and pushed him roughly down the steps. Into that dissection room of bones and pickled organs, salted babies and mildewing cadavers.
The stink was unbearable.
The floor had been dug up and a gagging, putrescent mist came off what had been uncovered.
A policeman with a bushy mustache and mutton-chop sideburns said, “Like a morgue in here, dear Christ, like a morgue.” He slapped Clow across the face and kept slapping him until Clow fell to that oozing, moist earth, sobbing and giggling. “Got to be the remains of a hundred in here, you dirty bastard, you sick and wretched ghoul…you’ll swing for this, God help me, you will…”
A couple other peelers were examining the hole in the wall and the great passage beyond. Using lamps they went in there, returning a few minutes later.
“Bones in there,” one of them said. “It must go on for a mile…nothing in there but bones. Bones that have been chewed and snapped.”
Clow tried to explain. “It were the king, the Corpse King. I was a-feeding him, I had to feed him! Ye ask Johnny Sherily if it all isn’t so, swear to God, swear to—”
But they just beat him to the floor. They didn’t want to hear anymore. They were pale and sickened and badly wanted to hurt Clow worse than they already had.
Another policeman wearing rubber gloves up to his elbows said, “Aye, a hundred corpses, sure. And that’s not counting the skulls and bottled parts.” He pulled the lid off a cask, digging around in there and yanking up a corpse out of the stinking brine by its hair. The bloated, furrowed face stared out at them. “And not counting these pickled ones, either.”
Clow was grinning and trembling. “You’d please to be careful of that one, kind s
ir, it being me mother and all…”
And that was how Samuel Clow finally found the gallows, the grave, and the thing that waited with ravening jaws for him beyond.
Hang Burke, banish Hare,
Burn Knox in Surgeon’s Square.
—nineteenth-century Scottish children’s rhyme
About the Editors
RICHARD CHIZMAR is the founder and publisher/editor of Cemetery Dance magazine and the Cemetery Dance Publications book imprint. He has edited more than a dozen anthologies, including The Best of Cemetery Dance, The Earth Strikes Back, Night Visions 10, October Dreams (with Robert Morrish), and the Shivers series.
BRIAN JAMES FREEMAN is the managing editor of Cemetery Dance Publications and the author of several novels and novellas, along with four short-story collections, including an ebook-only exclusive that hit #1 on Amazon.com in the US, UK, Germany, Spain, and France in the short-story categories. His blog and website can be found at: http://www.BrianJamesFreeman.com.
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Dark Screams, Volume 6 Page 18