The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  My ears sang and popped as we descended. The level of the circle of water beneath our boots crept toward the footboard, and Brunel explained that the eagerness of the air to escape the bell almost precisely countered the eagerness of the water to enter, but air was compressible while water was not.

  “I used this apparatus before,” he said, “to inspect the aftereffects of the first inundation. I was able to step from the footboard onto the corner of number twelve frame of the tunnelling shield: a quite remarkable experience. What do the bones say? Are we close?”

  The tin was tucked into the pocket of my trousers, and the fingerbones inside it were rattling like a demented castanet. “They are very excited,” I said.

  The bell grounded with a solid thump. Beneath the rim of the footboard, a circle of black mud and gravel lay under about six inches of cloudy water. Brunel, the labourer and I scoured it with grappling hooks until, red-faced, our eyes starting from their sockets, we were forced to pull the communicating string, and were lifted to the surface and a brief respite in the fresh air before being submerged again.

  And so it went for half a dozen attempts, until at last the labourer hooked the end of a long black bone. Brunel stepped down from the footboard and delved in the silt and pulled up the bone. I took it from him (it was a humerus), feeling the tin vibrate with a regular tarantella. We went up for air and came straight back down, and Brunel and the labourer began to excavate the two feet or so of silt above the brick arch of the tunnel, and at last uncovered a bundle as long as a man, wrapped in something like the casing of a giant beetle, black and slippery and stinking badly.

  It took all three of us to haul it onto the footboard, and when we were done we were dizzy and gasping for breath. Brunel pulled the string, four long strong tugs, and we rose up for the last time and were swung above the deck of the barge; and never more grateful was I to feel sunlight on my face as I ducked under the dripping edge of the bell.

  Brunel and I unwrapped the body on a bench in the long shed. The wrapping had once been the hide of some large animal; a few patches of coarse hairs still clung to it here and there. Although it had been cured by centuries in the river mud, it stank horribly, and was as stiff and brittle as if turned to wood. Brunel used his pocket knife to cut away the final leaf, and a slough of black mud slid out, thick as porridge, to reveal a human skeleton. It was missing its right arm, which might have fallen away through a ragged tear in the shroud, and its skull.

  Brunel looked at me across the rack of wet bones. “How is your tin?”

  “Curiously quiet.”

  Brunel clapped his hands together in delight. “Then I think we have our prize. The question is, just what do we have?”

  “I cannot raise the dead, Mr Brunel, and there’s no ghost or imp associated with these bones. It’s a skeleton, no more and no less, of a man who died a long while ago.”

  “I know little about bones,” Brunel said, “but I don’t think that ordinary skeletons engender an anxious vitality in one of their stray components. And then there is the matter of the missing head.”

  “It is a puzzle.”

  “For every puzzle there is a practical solution. Even in the matters in which you are expert, I hope. We have a skeleton here, and a bit of bone that dances a jig, it is so anxious to be reunited with its fellows. We have the bad dreams of myself and Coffee Joe, and at least half a dozen others who were intimate with this site. We have the water that grew so agitated yesterday, and that exerted a certain power over you, Mr Carlyle.”

  “And which also tasted of blood.”

  Brunel levelled his bright gaze at me. “And blood, I might think, being a vital fluid, could have some importance in these occult matters.”

  “It is not a matter of the occult, Mr Brunel. But I do agree that we may have stumbled on something deeper than ordinary ghosts. And there is one more fact that we must take into account. This was no ordinary death.”

  I showed Brunel where the seventh cervical vertebra had been severed by some very sharp blade. “It was a downward stroke,” I said, “to judge by the angle of the cut.”

  “Signifying?”

  “He was kneeling, and the man who beheaded him struck from above.”

  “As in an execution.”

  “Precisely.”

  We examined the bones closely. It was the skeleton of someone who had stood well over six feet in life. We found a ring of blackened metal loose on the bone of the forefinger of the left hand; a nick with the blade of Brunel’s pocket knife showed that it was gold, and when he polished it with a scrap of cloth, he revealed a name inscribed on the inner face: Ulpius Silvanus. We found the point of an arrow buried in an old, healed wound in the right thigh bone. We found a much-corroded buckle, decorated with a relief of a man wearing a kind of stocking cap and riding a bull.

  Ulpius Silvanus had been a tall, strongly built man who, judging by the arrow wound, might once have been a soldier. He had been beheaded, but his corpse had not been looted, and he had been wrapped in a shroud of cowhide and tipped into the river, where the tides had at last washed his remains to the spot which, centuries later, the progress of Brunel’s tunnel had disturbed. His arm had become detached from the rest of his bones, and two fingerbones had washed into the tunnel through one of the innumerable small seeps at the working face. Coffee Joe had taken it, perhaps as a lucky piece, and caused all the trouble that had followed. Many questions remained, not least why the man had been executed, and when. The name inscribed on the ring suggested the Roman era, and Brunel said that he would call on the expertise of a curator at the British Museum, where many of the finds fallen into the excavations had been lodged.

  I felt a profound satisfaction. Not only had I taken on my first client, but I had solved the case within two days. I told Brunel that I hoped that now the curse had been lifted the tunnel would soon be completed, so that I would be able to walk its length from one side of the Thames to the other, and assured him of my full attention should there be any problem concerning the interment of the remains.

  Brunel solemnly shook his head from side to side, just once. “It is not the end of the matter,” he said. “You have forgotten Dr Pretorius.”

  “Not at all. The man is dangerous, certainly, and although I have no proof that would satisfy the police I am convinced that he was responsible for the murder of Coffee Joe. But he is a mountebank, Mr Brunel, no better than the gypsy girl.”

  “Nevertheless, he found Coffee Joe, and he found you, too.”

  “I suppose there was the imp,” I said reluctantly, and had to explain to Brunel what Dr Pretorius had left behind in the cellar where Coffee Joe had been murdered.

  “He is not entirely a mountebank, then,” Brunel said.

  “I suppose not. What do you propose to do now?”

  “I have strong evidence that someone else has been searching for these bones,” Brunel said. “I would very much like you to hear it, Mr Carlyle, and give me your opinion.”

  We covered the bones of poor Ulpius Silvanus with an oilcloth, locked up the shed, and walked east along Rotherhithe Street, between the river and the Surrey Docks, to a little tavern by the name of The Porter’s Rest. Approached from an undistinguished back street, and entered through a tiny court, it revealed itself to be hanging half over the river, jammed between the higgledy-piggledy buildings on either side like some ancient galleon at its last anchorage. The timbers framing the plaster walls of the tap and parlour were black oak, and not one met its fellows at anything resembling a right angle, so that the little room seemed to be leaning in the teeth of a gale. There was a bench under the mullioned window and two settles fitted with faded red bolsters faced each other on either side of a fireplace of rough stones. A crooked door to one side of the fireplace let into a dark, crooked snug, where two crooked ancients were hunched over a ladder of dominoes on a crooked table, and a sliding window at the far end of the room opened onto the bar of the establishment, where a stout old man with a polishe
d pate sat on a high-seated chair, the guardian of the row of beer-pulls set at the shelf by the window. He wore a pair of spectacles on the very tip of his nose, and was perusing a newspaper held only a few inches from his face, moving it, and not his eyes, as he read up and down its close-printed columns.

  Brunel greeted the old man with no little respect, and asked after Jake. The man carefully folded the newspaper in half and laid it on the scrubbed pine table which took up most of the space of his little kingdom, looked at Brunel over the top of his spectacles, and told him that he would send the pot-boy for him directly, looked at me, looked at Brunel again, and asked what refreshment we would require while we waited.

  Brunel said, “We’ll take two glasses of the Absolutely Stunning, Mr Welch, and I hope you’ll join us in a little something.”

  The old man allowed that it was a little early for him, but he’d gladly set aside something to go with his supper, drew into pewter tankards two pints of dark ale, and said, as he handed them through the window, “Your company is always welcome here, Mr Brunel, but I’m sorry that you should choose to ask in a rogue like Jake Mullins.”

  “I can promise you there’ll be no trouble, Mr Welch,” Brunel said, turning his hat around in his nimble white fingers like an admonished schoolboy.

  “It’s not trouble I’m worried about,” the old man said. “If it was trouble I worried about, I would have closed up the Porter’s as soon as I inherited the care of it from my late father. Should trouble stick its nose around the door of my establishment, I deal with it sharply, so that it knows that it has no place here.” Here, he gave me a significant look. “My concern is that your invitation will give Jake Mullins the idea that the Porter’s is a house he can use regular, and that ain’t the case at all.”

  “I could always find him in his own haunt,” Brunel said, with a glance and a smile at me. “The Black Bear, I believe, is his house of choice.”

  “It’s his house of last chance, in my considered opinion, and I wouldn’t think of a gentleman such as yourself, and your friend here, troubling to go there.”

  The old man gave me another significant look, and Brunel said, “I have been tardy in my introductions. My friend is Mr Carlyle, late of Edinburgh.”

  “I can’t say I know him,” Mr Welch said, “but he’s welcome enough, I’m sure. Jake Mullins is another matter. I’ll be glad if you make it clear to him that a single pint is all he’s due here, today and tomorrow, and any other day for that matter.”

  Brunel humbly assented to the condition and paid the price of that single pint in advance, and I bought a wedge of cheese and bread to fortify myself after my underwater adventure. We made ourselves comfortable at the window overlooking the river, its broad flood as red as blood in the lingering light of the summer sunset. Swallows and bats were swooping to and fro as they chased insects just above the calm surface of the reach of water between the bank and a file of ships anchored stern to bow.

  Brunel told me that Mr Welch had run the establishment for more than forty years, and knew everything worth knowing about any business along this part of the river. “It was he who sent a message about what was seen in the river above my tunnel,” he said, “and told me how to contact the man who saw it.”

  “And what was it he saw?”

  “I think you should hear that from him,” Brunel said, looking past me and half rising, “for here he is now.”

  I turned, and saw not a man at all, but an indistinct figure as hung with ghosts and imps as a battleship on review is hung with flags. The imps clung to his hair and shoulders like a congregation of tiny, spiky black monkeys; the ghosts swirled around him like rags of fog, their filmy faces set with despair and desperation. Several of the strongest glimpsed me, and set up such a fearsome agitation that the entire company promptly exploded all around the room. I jumped up in a hot panic, knocking over my pint pot, dispatched them all, and fell back into my seat in a swoon as Brunel crossed the room in three strides and grabbed hold of the collar of the grizzled wretch who had been their host.

  While the pot-boy mopped up spilled beer, I sipped at the balloon of brandy that Brunel had thrust into my hands, and felt my blood begin to circulate again. Brunel was placating Mr Welch, and the man I had so summarily freed of his burden sat hunched on a stool, telling the frothy head of his pint of Absolutely Stunning that he felt as if all his bones had been taken out of him, that he might have had a stroke or a conniption fit, and that he should be attended to by a doctor at once, before he gave his soul up to the Other Side.

  Brunel, when he was done with Mr Welch (or rather, when that good man was done with him), sat between us and looked from one to the other, and said, “I suppose you had better tell me what happened, Mr Carlyle, because I don’t believe that Jake here quite knows where he is.”

  “I know,” the man said, “that I needs a doctor.”

  He was a man in his late thirties, his face seamed and sunburnt, a cap set back on the grey, greasy curls of his head, the knot of the red handkerchief slung around his neck under his vigorous grey beard. His shirt was half-unbuttoned and its sleeves rolled up his muscular brown arms, and his corduroy trousers were so stiff with mud that they could have stood by themselves.

  “You’ll make do with this for now,” Brunel said, handing him a wedge of cheese.

  The man looked at it, sniffed it, and finally gnawed at it, looking sideways at me as if afraid that I would take it from him. Brunel was looking at me too.

  “I removed his burden,” I said. “I can assure you that he will suffer no ill effects – quite the reverse, in fact.”

  Brunel nodded, and said that he thought he understood.

  The man, Jake Mullins, looked up from his gnawing, and said that he didn’t understand it at all. After some prompting from Brunel, he allowed that perhaps a doctor wasn’t required, at least not at the instant, and the young engineer told me that Jake Mullins was a fisher of men, and so was well matched to me, a fisher of an altogether different kind of intelligence.

  “I wouldn’t call ’em intelligent,” Jake Mullins said. “Not when I finds ’em, anyways.”

  He seemed much calmer now, and there was purpose in his gaze. He pressed a fist to the small of his back and straightened on his stool with a sigh, and took up his pint pot and drank a good deal of it down in a single draught, wiping his lips and beard with his forearm and sighing again, like a man sinking into the comforts of domesticity after a long day’s work.

  Mr Welch, leaning at his little window, took note of that sigh, and said sharply, “Don’t you make yourself at home, Jake Mullins, and don’t think you’ll get more than that pint out of me, either. Whether your business is long or short with these gentlemen, that’s all you’ll get, so sip it with care.”

  “Don’t you worry,” Jake Mullins said cheerfully. “I’m not going to cause you any trouble.”

  Two regular customers came in just then, greeting Mr Welch by name, and saving him from making a reply.

  Jake Mullins took another (much smaller) draught of beer, and said, “He’s all right, is Welchy, except that he is a bit too particular about who deserves his custom. It’s my trade that he doesn’t like, so it’s peculiar, ain’t it, that my trade brings me here to talk with you, Mr Brunel. And with your friend, whoever he may be.”

  I introduced myself and shook Jake Mullins’s hand, which was as hard as any length of black oak in the room.

  “A Scottish gentleman,” he said. “Perhaps you’re a doctor – I know they’re famous for their surgeons – which is why you’re able to tell me that I’ll be ‘quite all right’.”

  “I see a man who has been labouring under a burden,” I said. “And I believe that he is beginning to realize that that burden has been lifted from him.”

  “Then perhaps you’re a clergyman,” Jake Mullins said. “You dress like one, saving the backwards collar. If not a clergyman, perhaps a missionary, come to save us poor benighted river rats.”

  “A clerg
yman is closer to the mark than a doctor,” I said.

  “Mr Carlyle has volunteered to advise me,” Brunel said, and produced with a flourish a half-sovereign from one of the pockets of his waistcoat. “This is what was agreed, I think: twice your inquest money. And now, if you please, Mr Mullins, you will tell your story.”

  Jake Mullins took the coin, rubbed it with a thumb, tasted it, rubbed it again, and shoved it into the pocket of his breeches. “I’m obliged,” he said. “There isn’t much to tell, but I’m sure you’ll think it worth it.”

  “It was just three nights ago, I believe,” Brunel said, with a fair amount of impatience.

  “It was. I was running along the Surrey shore in my little boat, past the wharf that used to service your diggings, when I seen it. A little boat like mine, standing seventy or eighty yards from the shore. I thought at first that Bullhead Harvey was in luck again. I was about to hail him, but then the moon peeped out from behind a cloud, and I saw two things. First, that Bullhead wasn’t alone, and second, the man I took for Bullhead weren’t him at all, but a man considerably thinner, with a bush, as it looked like, of white hair. The white-haired fellow was in the stern of the boat watching the other man work, and the other man was not someone I cared to make acquaintance of on the river; or any other place, for that matter.”

  “He was a big man,” I said, “with dark skin.”

  Brunel shot me a glance, and Jake Mullins said, “If you know him, then you know why I hung back. Almost too big for the boat, he was, and either a Nubian or a Lascar, with a shaved head, and a neck quite as thick. He’d been leaning over the water when I first spied the boat, but then he stood up, hauling on a kind of chain mounted with hooks. The white-haired gent was talking to him in some queer argot, sounding pretty impatient, and holding on to the thwarts because the boat was rocking from side to side, fit to capsize.