In jars by the window were some of the creatures’ pink innards. No wonder Mr Hill didn’t tell anyone about what he was doing.
Just then, there was a huge bang of thunder and all the lights in the street went out.
I watched in horror as the great head of the bear slowly turned its head toward me, its black eyes glittering with life. Its jaw slowly widened and it drooled saliva. I dropped the ring of keys.
A new sound took over from the hissing of the cooling unit. This time it really was breathing. A lot of breathing. I looked down and saw a bat creeping toward me on the tips of its wings. I jumped backwards in fright. A half-finished dog was coming up behind me, although it had difficulty walking because its legs were only wire and bone, and screwed-up newspapers stuck out from the gap in its stomach.
A huge centipede curled and stretched by my hand. Several rats dropped onto the desktop and scampered around me into the hall. Little patches of dried fur were falling off the bear as it lumbered toward me, shoving all the other creatures out of the way. A cat yowled in pain as he stood on its foot. The dogs whimpered. The foxes cried like babies. All these animals were hurting.
There was a crash as the stand that had been propping up the great bear fell over. All the animals were on the move. I could smell their stale breath, the sawdust and balls of newspaper that had taken the place of their entrails. I could feel their pain. They were creeping, hopping, staggering in terrible angry pain.
I stumbled backwards as the bear lunged for the door.
The house was in total darkness. I ran along the hall but caught the banister against my hip and fell onto my knees. I could hear the creatures coming out of the front bedroom. I heard scratching, scampering, thumping, whimpering, growling. They were coming closer every second. A perfectly preserved tarantula threw itself onto my back. I could feel its hairy legs pattering against the nape of my neck.
Knowing that I could not reach the stairs in time, I climbed to my feet and ran back to my room, but the animals were very close now. I dived inside and shoved the door shut, just as the bear wrapped its great clawed paw around the jamb and tried to push its way inside. He was forcing it open to let all the smaller creatures in. I kicked the door hard on his paw until he withdrew it with a great roar. And there I stayed, pushed against the door, until eventually the scratching and clawing stopped, and it sounded like they went away.
I didn’t know what to do. Should I risk opening the door? I knew I’d be anxious until I had checked, so I slowly opened it and looked out.
The hall was empty. The door to the front bedroom was still unlocked, and the big ring of keys was on the floor, exactly where I had dropped it. But I hadn’t imagined the stuffed animals. They filled the room, crouching or standing on every surface, and they still smelled bad. The bear was facing back to the window now, where it had been to start with. But there was something floating in the air—sawdust settling, like they had only just got back into position before I opened the door.
I went to the landing window and stared down into the street, or rather the nearest part of it, as the rest had completely disappeared in the fog.
As I stood watching, a figure slowly came into view and opened the front garden gate, but it wasn’t my mum. Whoever it was seemed to be having trouble walking, like they had sprained their ankle. A few moments later I heard the front door open and shut. Someone was climbing the stairs. I heard feet thumping and dragged on the stairs, coming nearer, and a strange crick-crack noise.
Mrs Hill was standing at the end of the hall in a green rain hat and Wellingtons. Her head was down. I couldn’t see her eyes.
‘I saw your mother go out, Paul,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you for a minute.’ Her voice was dry and whispery, as though her vocal cords had rusted.
As she walked toward me she dripped rain everywhere. She took off her hat and scratched her fingers through her hair. Mrs Hill was paler and bonier than I remembered, like she’d been dieting and hiding indoors for months. She stopped about three feet in front of me.
She smelled like mildew, like something that had been left past its sell-by date at the back of the fridge, and there was another smell too, the same dog smell about her like the bear, but I figured it was because her hair was wet. I couldn’t move any further back, because the room of stuffed animals was behind me.
I didn’t know what to do so I asked her if she wanted a cup of tea.
Slowly she raised her head. Her skin was as yellow and dry as an old newspaper. I looked in her eyes and saw glittering blue marbles, like a doll’s. The left one was cracked. It had turned up and rolled in a little, so that I could see the damp blackness inside her socket.
‘What have you been telling people about me?’
‘Nothing,’ I lied. ‘It was a mistake.’
‘You told the street that my husband killed me with a shovel on Bonfire Night and buried me in the garden. Don’t lie to me.’
‘No, I only told Andy, no-one else. As for the thing about your head being cut off and stuck on a pole in the shed, the story just got sort of stretched as it went around.’
She fumbled blindly with her handbag, snapping it open to dig out a handkerchief. Mopping the rain from her face, she smeared paint from her lips. ‘You saw me leave on Bonfire Night. I didn’t come back.’
‘Okay.’ I wasn’t interested in what they got up to. Anything to make her go. Reaching down, she placed a hand on my shoulder and gripped it tightly. Her fingers were so bony that it felt like being pinched by crab claws. I was sure there was nothing in her that was still alive, no beating heart, no pulsing blood, just cold leathery flesh.
‘Mr Hill saved me. Two months before Bonfire Night I had an accident. I fell down the stairs and nearly broke my neck, and he looked after me, even though things weren’t good between us. I don’t want to see him hurt. Do you understand?’
‘I understand.’
Suddenly she bent down close to me. ‘No more lies, Paul. That’s one of my rules. No more lies or I will come back and find you. I will take out your guts and fill the space with straw and sawdust.’ She stretched open her mouth and I saw right inside. There was newspaper at the back of it, sticking up out of her throat.
She released her bruising grip and turned to leave, her knees crick-cracking. When she went to put on her rain hat I saw the stitches, a neat dark row of them behind each ear.
She walked as if she was in great pain. As she slowly went down the stairs I noticed the uneven seams that ran down the backs of her legs. As she gripped the stair-rail with long red nails, I knew there were wires poking out of her fingertips. Her skin seemed to have been sewn back too tightly, like a cover on a sofa that didn’t quite fit.
The front door opened and closed. I watched her hobble sadly down the empty street and disappear piece by piece into the fog.
The sawdust settled. The house was silent once more, as if wild things had returned to sleeping death. As I sat in the kitchen waiting for Mum to come back, I looked out into the foggy front garden, fearful of what I might now be able to see. I’d rather been hoping for a visit from Santa Claus, but now I didn’t want to think what might come down the chimney.
When Mum came home I told her what had happened, but she didn’t seem surprised. ‘That Mrs Hill,’ she sniffed. ‘She’s had a bit of work done if you ask me. And you—you’ve got too much imagination.’
But I knew the truth. The world has a rulebook. One of the rules is:
The dead can’t be brought back to life.
Sometimes the rulebook is wrong.
Dead Ground Zero
To: William Barnsley, Cartographic Institute, Madrid
Cc: Dr Daniel Thompson, Dept Head, University College Hospital, London
From: Prof. Margaret Winn, UCH London
Subject: All Hallows Church
Dear William,
The department is insisting I use email now, citing the fact that it’s faster and conveys more urgency, which is just as well as
I have something rather urgent to discuss with you.
Sorry you couldn’t make it over to the conference at St Alfege’s. Just as well though, as all the usual imbeciles were there, blocking any progress that might be made. The members of the Catholic Council were barking up the wrong tree as usual, exercising themselves about birth control and women priests when they should have been commenting on the problem at hand, and the CoE synod weren’t much better, wittering on about gay clergy, so little was achieved. Put a bunch of priests in a room together and they’ll start planning the music programme for the orchestra to play as the Titanic goes down. The fact that church attendances have all but disappeared in these troubled times seems to have completely escaped them. Don’t get me started on that. I caught the PM’s speech last night about how we must all pull together to overcome our economic adversities, and how Britain can teach the rest of the world how to survive the recession. He was speaking from a fact-finding trip to Texas. The GBP is now worth less than the rand and he’s hobnobbing with oil barons.
I attended the one-day event because I wanted to raise a question about All Hallows Church, but there was no time left at the end of the meeting to even touch on the subject. Do you know the building? It’s a rather unlovely late Victorian pile in stained Portland stone, with flying buttresses and a collapsing spire, on Blackheath Road at the edge of Greenwich Park.
I went there last month because there’s an odd story about the diocese that keeps surfacing (in my world, at least; you know how much time I spend researching for the London Archaeological Society at the British Library). The architect Nicholas Hawksmoor had a raft of apprentices who took his more controversial views rather too much at face value. It’s known that one apprentice, Thomas Moreby, worked on All Hallows, and while it’s certain that he oversaw the construction of the crypt and undercroft, nobody knows how much of the above-ground part of the building he finished. It’s a bit pointless to wonder now, because the upper section was completely rebuilt around 1850.
Anyway, as I arrived, I noticed a row of bright yellow JCBs lined up in the car park. There were also about a dozen protesters (mostly senior citizens) in rain-hoods hanging about looking cold and bored. One of them had a sign that read ‘KEEP THE COUNTRYSIDE GREEN’, like we were in the New Forest or something. Blackheath is the suburbs, for Heaven’s sake. I know they mean well, but I think they enjoy being victims.
So I pulled over, hopped out and took a look, and sure enough they’d started to excavate the grounds immediately behind the church. Apparently, the idea is that the New Festival of Britain site is to have a tram-link to the Millennium Dome, which I supposed is one reason for the site’s selection. Which brings me to the urgency of this note; you’re a cartographer and know about these things better than I, but isn’t there a long-standing government order not to dig up the east side of the park? Can they simply override it without consultation?
I’d appreciate it if you could get back to me as quickly as possible. I came past the site again yesterday and it looks as if they’ve already started digging.
Best as ever,
Prof. Margaret Winn
—
To: William Barnsley, Cartographic Institute, Madrid
Cc: Dr Daniel Thompson, Dept Head UCH London
From: Prof. Margaret Winn, UCH London
Subject: All Hallows Church
Dear William,
Thanks for your prompt reply. That’s what I thought. But I’ve checked, and no such consultation has taken place. On Saturday I visited the Museum of London and met with your old colleague Diane Fermier, who by the way sends her regards. Down in that dimly lit basement we pulled out the original mapping grid of the Blackheath area. The seventeenth-century boundary lines surrounding the park and church are surprisingly unchanged from those of the present day. It seems pretty obvious to me that no-one has bothered to check up on this, a fact I find simply amazing.
Actually, the area between the park and the heathland has been disturbed on at least three occasions. Most recently, the largest ditches were filled with rubble from houses and factories bombed during the Blitz in 1940. Before that, George III ordered a number of large houses pulled down, and their remains were buried on the site in 1803 (this was at a time when the king was suffering from one of his lapses into madness—I imagine he thought the property belonged to raving Papists). Before that we find an estimated figure of almost 11,000 people buried on the site in the months directly preceding the Great Fire of London.
Now, although parish records do not extend to recording the deaths of London’s poorest citizens, I’m pretty sure these were the earliest victims of the bubonic plague that swept the city in the year preceding the fire. Of the 100,000 who died, it would seem that over ten percent of the total were placed here on one site because the soft clay soil was easily removable. According to Diane, some of the rich were buried in lead coffins, but all the rest were placed in winding cloths or sacks, and here is my point: if they were then put in wet clay, surely this would act as a preservative?
I checked with an opposite number in Brussels, because as you know, the Belgian government has been heavily involved in the disinterment of animal remains from peat bogs on the borders of Northern France, and they have found that not only is skin and hair remarkably well preserved, but in many cases DNA sampling has shown that diseases we thought long-eradicated remained in stasis within animal carcasses.
If this is the case, what happens when the diggers reach London’s dead? The sites in the centre of the old city have never been disturbed on this kind of scale. Do you know any epidemiologists who could offer advice about this? Clearly the government doesn’t care to delve this deeply into the subject, but I think someone should make sure that there’s no risk of contagion.
Best as ever,
Prof. Margaret Winn
—
To: William Barnsley, Cartographic Institute, Madrid
Cc: Dr Daniel Thompson, Dept Head, UCH London
From: Prof. Margaret Winn, UCH London
Subject: All Hallows Church
Dear William,
I was surprised by your email yesterday. Can you really be so sure? I appreciate the point that centuries of low core temperature should have killed off the hardiest microbes, but no-one has ever tested a single site of this magnitude before. Now it emerges that the dig is to extend over forty metres down in order to incorporate several lift shafts and a large underground car park. This means disturbing a vast quantity of bodies.
I spoke with the site foreman, and he told me that he has been instructed to shift any ‘debris’ he finds into separate containers so that an archeological expert can sift through it, but he has not been told about the potential health risk posed by any finds, and has not been asked to quarantine any human remains. Indeed, he seems to have no knowledge about the history of the site. If you really feel this is an overreaction on my part, then I shall leave you to your work and seek advice elsewhere.
Prof. Margaret Winn
—
To: Professor Margaret Winn, UCH London
From: Dr Marcus Hemming, Wellcome Institute
Dear Prof. Winn,
Thank you for your enquiry about the current excavation of the site at Blackheath designated for the New Festival of Britain. I had read about this in the press, but was surprised to hear that the land was formerly used as a plague pit. I must say I’m rather sceptical about this, as the distribution of the victims has been outlined in a number of historical records starting as early as 1667, and no-one has ever singled out this site in particular. It seems especially unlikely as we know the pathogenic route of the plague, from which this area is far removed.
Are you sure about your facts?
—
To: Dr Marcus Hemming, Wellcome Institute
From: Professor Margaret Winn, UCH London
Dear Dr Hemming,
Let me set out my case. I hope you’ll be able to understand my concerns after reading this.<
br />
In 2004, the London Metropolitan Archive in Clerkenwell received a set of large hand-drawn maps from the estate of one Oliver Whitby or Whichby (the spelling differs in different texts), who was the former Justice of the Rolls at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. These items were found when the deceased’s possessions were unparcelled from a lot sold but never examined by his great-grandfather. One of the problems faced by the LMA is the microfiching of material prior to disintegration, and as the maps were not deemed of sufficient public importance to receive preferential treatment they have sat in the basement of the LMA awaiting scans since their arrival.
In my researches, I met a young woman in charge of scanning these documents, and when she showed me the maps pertaining to the S.E. London area in question, extending across Blackheath to the edge of the church and the park, I made copies because I knew I had seen their outline somewhere before, but could not remember where.
I’m sure you know that the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor built six complex churches to his personal design, the nearest to the excavation site being St. Alfege’s Church at Greenwich. While attending a seminar in that building recently, I was shown a layout dating from the period immediately following the Great Plague, which bore exactly the same borders.
Now, this is where it gets interesting: the Whitby family built and maintained a number of private burial sites around London. The first was constructed in 1642 at Blackheath, and the LMA’s maps show a shaded section of the heath which, according to a coda found in Oliver Whitby’s notes, had been set aside for the burial of plague victims.
So far as I know, this is the only evidence that has ever been uncovered pertaining to the burial of victims in this area. If it can be proven that these documents are real and not forgeries—and why would they be?—I think I have a case to stop the excavations before any real damage can be caused. What I need from you is some kind of testimonial which acknowledges the possibility that plague bacilli might be able to survive at low temperatures for long periods of time. Would that be possible?
Red Gloves, Volumes I & II Page 3