The Black Country

by Alex Grecian

  But the girl was interesting.

  On the third night the girl made a play for his attention, he smiled at her. He hadn’t meant to. He couldn’t help himself. He immediately stood and left the pub, but he returned the next night.

  And the next night.

  Tonight he pretended not to notice the girl, but he saw her smile, trying to catch his attention, and he knew she was the only reason he was still in that village. He thought of Joe Poole and his friend’s ready smile and finally he began to understand that he was lonely. He had worked so hard to avoid human connections, to avoid anything that might make him weak or vulnerable, that he had neglected the small part of himself that still craved the company of others.

  He knew he should move on, leave West Bromwich and never look back.

  Instead, he stood and went to the girl and bowed.

  “My name,” he said, “is Calvin.”

  “It’s good to meet you, Calvin,” she said. “My name is Hester.”

  42

  What did he say?” Campbell said. “I can’t hear him.”

  “He said he’s found the boy,” Hammersmith said.

  “Oliver? He’s found Oliver down there?” The Scotsman looked stricken. He was panting, still out of breath after emerging from the midst of the blizzard just seconds earlier. There was a small gathering of men around the well. The blizzard had caused the seam to be shut down for the day, and some of the miners and their families had come out to see why one of the strangers was shouting down into the village well. Word had apparently spread, despite the storm, and the throng was growing. Hammersmith had said very little to any of them, but as more people were drawn to the spectacle, the first arrivals filled them in on the situation. Aside from these short murmured conversations, the villagers had been silent, riveted to the sound of Day’s distant voice. Hammersmith saw one of the miners reach out to pat Campbell on the back, as if comforting him.

  “He’s mistaken,” Campbell said. “He must be. It’s dark down there. He doesn’t know what he’s found.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Hammersmith said. Several of the other men mumbled in agreement. Nobody wanted Oliver Price to be at the bottom of the well. “Quiet,” Hammersmith said. “He’s talking.”

  The crowd went silent and Hammersmith leaned far over the well’s lip, listening. He felt Campbell take hold of the back of his overcoat, steadying him, and Hammersmith grabbed the posts on either side of the well as insurance in case the bird-watcher intended to push him in.

  “I didn’t hear you!” Hammersmith turned his head so that his right ear was out of the wind and concentrated on Day’s answering voice. The inspector sounded so far away that he might have been in the next village over. Hammersmith felt Campbell shift his weight behind him.

  “Did he say anything more?” Campbell said. “What’s he saying?”

  “He can’t climb back up,” Hammersmith said. “He’s hurt his shoulder and can’t carry the boy back up here.”

  “Tell him to sit on the bucket and loop the rope around his waist. We’ll pull him up,” Campbell said.

  “That’s not very steady. If he falls off the bucket, the rope could slip upward and strangle him,” Hammersmith said.

  Campbell shook his head. He seemed impatient, less interested in Day’s safety than in what he’d found down there. “Then tell him to make a noose, a big loop of some kind, and get it up under his arms.”

  “Sir!” Hammersmith bellowed into the darkness. “Tie the rope around you! Somehow! Do it so that you’re comfortable and so it will bear your weight!”

  Hammersmith waited. He straightened up and looked around him. There were perhaps twenty villagers around the well now. Most of them men, but there were three women. Hammersmith guessed that their children had all been left safe and warm inside their homes. Everyone looked grim and anxious. And cold. Campbell was shivering. He was the only person there who wasn’t wearing a coat or a hat, or even a jacket. He must have come out in a hurry.

  Hammersmith heard a faint echo and leaned back over the top of the well. He listened for a moment and then grabbed the rope and began to pull at the knot. He shouted over his shoulder, “He’s ready! Let’s pull him up!”

  Campbell stepped forward and gently moved Hammersmith back out of the way, then took the length of rope from him. The other villagers stayed where they were, watching the giant Scotsman. Campbell loosened the bowline knot that Hammersmith had tied earlier and pulled the rope through the wooden pulley block until it was taut. Then he hauled the line up, hand over hand, more quickly than any three men could have moved together, the muscles in his massive arms and shoulders rippling with the effort. Hammersmith could hear the rope zinging through the pulley and could see steam from the friction rising in the cold air. It had taken Inspector Day a half an hour to get to the bottom of the well, with gravity on his side. It took Campbell five minutes to bring him back up.

  Day was dripping wet, the back of his overcoat in tatters and his gloves hanging torn and useless from his wrists. Calvin Campbell took one look at what Day was holding in his arms and turned and disappeared into the storm. Hammersmith heard his muffled footsteps in the snow, running fast back toward the church. Hammersmith briefly considered following him, but instead he went to Day and helped his inspector back to solid ground where two village women were ready with a blanket for him.

  Nobody looked at Oliver Price and nobody spoke a word, but the third woman of the group took the tiny body from Day and carried it away into the storm.

  43

  The storm gave the American time to think. He had checked his snares after killing the policeman and found a badger, caught in the wee hours, still alive and snarling. Its meat was oily and dense, but it filled the American’s belly well enough. He had to finish chewing each bite and swallow before both hands were free to tear another piece from the badger’s carcass. He chewed with one hand pressed over the gap in his face, and while he chewed, he thought.

  One of the men from London had seen the American in the woods. The American could have killed him then, but Campbell had been nearby, and so had the village constable and the other Londoner. The odds had been against the American. He liked to kill at a distance, liked to use the rifle. He was good with it. Fighting and killing in close quarters was more difficult and—although he would never admit this, even to himself—the American was afraid. Ever since Campbell had cut away part of his face, the American had avoided people, kept himself at a distance. It was better that way.

  But the man from London had seen him. He had probably told Campbell. Which meant that Campbell was either holed away somewhere, waiting out the storm, hiding from the American, or he was already leaving the village, running again. Campbell had never stood his ground, never sought the American out, and there was no reason to think he would decide to do so now.

  Campbell had spent the better part of the last decade in another prison where the American couldn’t get at him. Campbell seemed to have an affinity for prisons. So the American had waited. He was good at waiting, but he didn’t want to wait any longer. There was trouble in this Black Country village and Campbell was mixed up in it somehow. The American needed to end this soon, before Campbell disappeared again.

  If Campbell was waiting out the storm, he would be leaving as soon as he could get away. Unless he was leaving now, using the storm as cover. Away from the village, he could go in any direction and lose himself in a big city or in the isolated countryside. Tracking him was a laborious process, and the American didn’t want to have to start over. So, whatever Campbell had decided to do, the American felt he only had one logical course of action open to him. The train was the fastest way out of the village, and so Campbell would eventually show up at the depot.

  The American gathered his things and packed his bag. He cut two thick badger steaks off the animal’s body, wrapped them in pages torn from another boo
k he’d found in the schoolhouse, and stuffed the bundle in the bottom of his gun bag. He cleaned the Whitworth and loaded it and slung it over his shoulder, picked up his bags, and crawled out the window, leaving the fire he’d built there to die out by itself.

  The sun was invisible, far above the grey clouds, so the American took a moment to orient himself, using the tree line as a marker. Then he set out, trudging through the deep snow toward the train depot.

  He would wait there, and Calvin Campbell would eventually come to him.

  44

  Henry Mayhew staggered past carrying a long wooden pew. Kingsley estimated the pew weighed perhaps three hundred pounds and he wondered, not for the first time, about the strength of his simpleminded assistant. Henry was of no use when it came to performing even the most straightforward of chemical experiments or basic autopsy procedures, but Kingsley had no regrets about hiring him. Henry was loyal and strong and kind, and he made Kingsley smile, which was a rare enough thing.

  Putting the pews back in place was the first thing Kingsley had decided to do after taking a look at the rows of hacking, crying, moaning villagers in the sanctuary. More than half of his new patients were on the floor, some of them lying directly on the cold floorboards. That wouldn’t do. Obviously someone, probably the vicar Brothwood, had determined that more bodies would fit in one side of the sanctuary if all the pews were moved to the other side. And Kingsley imagined that the decision had been motivated by a desire to preserve the antique pews. Otherwise, the situation made no sense. And so Kingsley had ignored the vicar’s stammered objections and he had put Henry to work restoring the sanctuary’s original layout.

  It had been slow work. A few patients had been carefully moved to the center aisle and a pew had been positioned in their place. They had been moved back, two patients per pew, feet to feet, their heads at the outer ends, and another row of patients had been moved to the center aisle. More villagers were being moved to the aisle than were being taken back because they took up more room on the pews than they did on the floor, but as pews were moved across from the east side of the sanctuary, space had begun to open up there. Henry, with the help of a few of the healthier volunteers, was ferrying them all the way across the aisle and gradually filling the entire room with sick people.

  It looked like a battlefield.

  Kingsley had tried to turn the altar into a makeshift worktop, but the vicar had put his foot down and so he had moved the podium down to the middle of the aisle and emptied his satchel on it. He had sent two boys to the apothecary with a few quid and a list of ingredients to bring back. Basically, he’d told the boys to empty the apothecary out. And he was sure there still wouldn’t be enough to work with. There had to be more than a hundred seriously ill people to take care of, and Kingsley had yet to see a well-stocked village apothecary. Still, he would assess the situation when the boys returned and begin treatment as soon as he possibly could. Meanwhile, he and Henry were doing what they could to make the villagers more comfortable.

  He helped Henry transfer a thin young woman onto a pew, then stopped by little Hilde Rose’s pew to check on her. She was awake, her eyes open and staring at the timbers of the ceiling. She turned her head when he approached.

  “I feel all right now,” she said. “May I go home?”

  Kingsley smiled. “Let’s have you rest a bit longer, okay?”

  “If you say I must.”

  “I do say so. I have something for you, though.” He reached into his pocket and brought out the tiny box that held the eyeball. “I was told this is yours.”

  “My eye!” She took the box from him and opened it, peeked inside and closed it again, and held it tight to her chest. “Thank you for returning it. It’s such an odd little thing, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose it must seem so to you.”

  “You’re finished looking at it?”

  “I am.”

  “And was it helpful to you? Do you know who it belongs to?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, it belongs to you.”

  “But it started out in someone’s face. We should try to discover who that might have been, shouldn’t we?”

  “I’m reasonably certain it started out in a pig’s face, my dear. I don’t think this is a human eyeball, though I can’t be sure.” Kingsley almost laughed at Hilde’s look of disappointment. “It’s better that nobody lost an eye, though, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Hilde said. “I suppose it is. Oh, of course it is. I’m sorry. It’s only that it would be so much more special if it were from a person, wouldn’t it? I mean, if the person weren’t hurt too terribly.”

  Kingsley opened his mouth to respond, but before he could speak, the front doors banged open. Calvin Campbell rushed through the foyer and down the central aisle without bothering to shut the doors behind him. He took no notice of anything or anyone, but ran, slipping and sliding in his wet boots, straight to the apse and through the door to the vicar’s cramped quarters. Brothwood hurried after him.

  Kingsley patted Hilde on her head and stood. He looked for Henry and saw his giant assistant rushing up the aisle toward the foyer. Henry bounded up the three steps and closed the door against the blowing wind and snow. He turned to Kingsley with a puzzled look on his face, but the doctor shook his head and shrugged.

  A moment later, someone shrieked. It was a woman’s voice, and it came from the small room that Campbell and the vicar had just entered. The voice sank in pitch and became a low wailing sound, longer and louder than the combined moaning of the villagers in the sanctuary. It wasn’t recognizably human, there were no words, but it was undeniably the most mournful sound Kingsley had ever heard.

  Someone’s life had just been ruined.

  He and Henry stood, side by side, their eyes riveted to the door. It slowly opened and the vicar reappeared. He went directly to the altar and knelt before the cross. Then Calvin Campbell emerged from the back room, his arms around a woman who could barely walk. Kingsley was good at sizing people up by sight: age, weight, social class, obvious maladies and defects. But this woman’s face was distorted by crushing grief, and it was impossible to tell whether she was thirty years old or fifty. She staggered along beside Campbell, who was half carrying her, her long blond hair like a veil, a rough blanket draped over her shoulders.

  The two of them walked past Kingsley and Henry without looking up or acknowledging their presence. They went beyond the last of the pews and turned and walked through the foyer. Campbell opened the main doors and led the woman out.

  Henry watched after them until they had been swallowed by the storm, then closed the doors again and returned to Kingsley’s side.

  “Who was she?” he said.

  Kingsley glanced to the front of the church where Brothwood still knelt in prayer. “We’ll find out eventually,” he said.

  Henry nodded and crossed the aisle and picked up another pew. There was still work to do.

  45

  The man in the tunnels had walked slowly south from the unmarked grave and continued for half a mile. He was weak and tired. No sleep and little food in days, so he sat for a bit with his back to the wall. He knew the old seams and pits like the back of his hand. He had spent many lonely nights traversing every passage. He had visited the grave often, each time wondering whether he would finally feel remorse or shame, and each time he had felt nothing at all. He knew that he was an evil man, but knowing it didn’t make him feel anything, either.

  There was a second grave that had been dug next to the first, an open empty hole, waiting for the man, but he hadn’t found the strength yet to lie down in it.

  He was far from the active seam, but there were still ways in and out, and he easily found the egress he wanted. When he felt rested, he climbed twenty wooden rungs that were sunk deep into the earth on both sides of the shaft. Nobody used those rungs anymore, but at one time this had been a hea
vily trafficked shaft and dozens of men had traveled up and down them every day. The ladder here was permanent and would probably outlast everybody in the village. It would last until the tunnel eventually collapsed in on itself.

  The rungs were dusted with snow, each rung piled higher than the one below it, but he was still mildly surprised to find himself in the midst of a storm when he poked his head up out of the shaft. He had been in the tunnels for days and had anticipated bright spring sunshine up above.

  He hauled himself up onto level ground and adjusted the pack on his back. He squinted into the snow. Ahead was the village well. Beyond it, he knew, was the inn. He was a few paces from the main road. His home was nearby, and he assumed his remaining children were waiting there for him. It was even possible his wife was waiting there, too, but he considered it far more likely that she was already in West Bromwich or Scotland or somewhere even farther away. Maybe she had taken the children with her. The man wouldn’t have blamed her for that.

  The parish church wasn’t far. Beyond that, nothing but wilderness. He judged it was late morning, perhaps early afternoon, but the smooth grey sky gave him no clues. It wasn’t nighttime, and that was the only thing he could tell for certain. Constable Grimes might be anywhere in Blackhampton, but he was most likely to be somewhere along the road between the well and the church. That was where the tiny jail, the tiny post office, and all the other tiny businesses were located. The man had just got his bearings and decided on a course of action when he heard a woman crying. The noise was soft, but distinct, muffled by the falling snow and distorted by the wind. The man took a step back away from the road, and a moment later, two shadowy figures staggered past, moving purposefully along the road. They were looking down at their feet and walked right by the man without seeing him.