The Edinburgh Dead

by Brian Ruckley

  “Never heard of a Blegg. Weir, I ken. So do you.”

  “Weir?”

  “Major Weir. Do you not ken your history, son?”

  Quire frowned. A connection he had not made before, struggling to be born in his mind: Macdonald, the antiquary, had said that Ruthven had taken items found in Major Weir’s house from their collections.

  “Well? You’re sitting there like a glaikit sheep,” Agnes prompted.

  “The name’s familiar, aye. Major Weir. Burned at the stake. Might be Ruthven’s interested in him too, from what I hear.”

  Quire was remembering old stories. Silly little tales, told around drinking tables, or to frighten children; tales he had not thought of for so long that they had lain buried, all but forgotten, in his mind.

  “Hundred and fifty years ago,” Agnes mused. “Weir was strangled and burned at the stake at the Gallowlee. They’re building their fine houses over it, on the road between here and their nice New Town. That’s the way of things now, isn’t it? They build over the past, think that makes it gone.

  “His sister hanged in the Grassmarket. There was hundreds burned, and hardly a one of them deserving the fate, but Weir maybe did. There was something fierce in him, no doubting it. Something dark.”

  She rose slowly from her stool, and crouched by the fire, taking one piece of coal at a time in her hand and tossing each on to the dwindling embers. The place was hardly needing more warmth, Quire thought, but her movements had the absent-minded sloth of habit, a soothing exercise to keep the thoughts moving in her mind.

  “These are old names you’re tossing about,” she mused. “They’ve got a long reach, back to before all this gas and steam and bright new world folk are making. Back to different times. Inscriptions upon a man’s skin, that might be binding work, or a protective endowment.

  “A feathered cross nailed to your door: now that might be just a thing meant to frighten, but it’s the shape of old workings. Divination, or curse, or both. Bring down misfortune on a man’s head, that could, if done right. Mark him for death.”

  “I’ve not been overburdened with good fortune, the last month or two,” Quire grunted. “I’m of a mind to share around some of the misery now.”

  “Is that right?” Agnes was distracted, hardly listening to him. “Weir. Not a good name to be talking about, not if there’s dark business being done. I’ll be damned if it’s not an ill omen. His house is still there, you know. Empty, for a century and a half.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Been a long time since those who think themselves sensible worried about such things. But it’s still there. I’d thought it’d been forgotten, and good riddance to the memory, but if there’s folk using his name, thinking on him… maybe not.”

  She tapped the bowl of her pipe gently against the edge of the table, spilling a tiny drift of spent ash.

  “Can you show me?” Quire asked her.

  “Might be I could. Might be worth a wee look, now you’ve brung up the old times. I’d a mind to come up to the big town anyway, get myself some cloth for the making of a skirt. Are you paying, though, son?”

  “I could put a shilling or two your way,” Quire said.

  And Agnes nodded at that, and took a hard enough suck through her pipe to set the tobacco glowing in the bowl.

  XXII

  The House of Major Weir

  “It’s a grim-looking place,” Quire observed.

  The courtyard he and Agnes McLaine peered into was narrow, gloomy. Desolate. A low-browed, vaulted passageway had brought them in beneath the soaring tenements of the West Bow to this hidden square, buried like an abscess in the very heart of the Old Town. They could hear the thud and grind of the building works on the new bridge; they could hear, less clearly, the rattle of carts over the West Bow’s cobbles and the cries of hawkers in the Grassmarket. But all of that was as the sound of another world, for the courtyard felt abandoned and lifeless.

  There was a crust of grime on the ground, and heaps of debris scattered around: rotting pieces of wood, piles of cloth or clothes so filthy it was impossible to say what colour they might once have been. The dusty smell of mould was in the air. A rat ran along the foot of one of the walls, its head bobbing up and down. When it realised it was no longer alone in its foraging, it vanished into a narrow crevice in the stonework.

  Yet the place was not abandoned; there were clearly some folk calling it home. There were doors around the yard, and dark stairways leading up into the surrounding tenements like burrows cut by maggots. Some of the higher windows, Quire saw as he cast his gaze upwards towards the distant square of sky, were open. A white sheet hung from one of them, though there was no breeze to dry it in this tight little space.

  “A few in here who’ll not be happy to have a sergeant of the police poking about, I’d guess,” Agnes mused.

  “I’m not with the police,” Quire said. “Not any more.”

  And that was true. He was cut loose from the foundations he had tried to set under his life in the last few years, his name struck from the books of the Edinburgh police.

  It had been unceremonious, abrupt. No opportunity to defend himself, or to face his accusers. Just a courier at his door, presenting letters signed by Baird himself, in ostentatious style, that informed Quire he was dismissed, on grounds of misconduct. No pension would be paid, no appeal heard.

  Reading those formal, impersonal lines of text, Quire could imagine quite clearly the satisfaction with which Baird must have signed his name beneath them. Seldom would a man have been so pleased to be the conveyor of bad tidings.

  “That’s where we’re bound,” Agnes said, nodding towards a door at the far end of the courtyard.

  She had come with her head and shoulders wrapped in a woollen shawl, though the weather was clement enough.

  They crossed the square side by side, Quire going cautiously and with a certain trepidation, Agnes advancing in her heavy leather shoes with an almost eager tread. The door they approached was black with rot, its wood drilled through by worms and decay. There were gaps between it and its frame. When Quire put his eye to one, he felt a cool touch on his skin, the dank apartments beyond breathing out over him.

  “It’s dark in there. Should have brought a lantern.”

  “There’ll be light enough,” Agnes said.

  Dismissal should have dismayed Quire more than it did, perhaps, but he was numb, and unsurprised. He had already resigned himself to this outcome. His life was being shaken apart, like a fox cub clasped in the jaws of a hunting dog, and he had come to expect little better. His mind had set itself to other purposes, though, and was too bent upon them to admit of mourning for his losses. He meant to do some shaking of his own now, of Ruthven and the rest. He needed only to find the right grip upon them.

  Agnes gave the door an exploratory rattle, curling her fingers around its edge where rot had eaten back the wood. Little flakes and splinters fell from it, even beneath such slight assault.

  “Should open up all right,” she said, but instead of testing that assumption, she took a step back and groped around in a pouch looped over the waistband of her heavy skirt. She brought forth a finger length of brown wood, unworked and unpolished. Just a section cut from a thin branch, with a hole in one end through which cord was threaded. She fastened that cord about her left arm so that the little piece of wood hung there, a pendant at her wrist.

  “Rowan, cut at Samhain,” she told Quire. “A ward against spirits, against evil.”

  Quire regarded the crude bracelet with a faint sense of puzzlement. He could still hear the shouts of the workers struggling to raise that huge new bridge over the Cowgate. He was standing in the midst of a city famed throughout Europe for its fostering of rational, secular thought; a city, it was said, that had lately held more learned men in each square foot than any other the country had ever seen. Yet he was looking at a witch’s charm, something out of a folk tale, and believing it might work; a wise precaution, perhap
s.

  “Have you got another one of them?” he asked Agnes, and she smiled.

  “Course I have.” She dropped the second pendant into his outstretched hand. “Can we call you a believer yet, then?”

  “Call me what you like,” Quire sniffed. “I stopped knowing what to believe a while back. I’m playing the game by the rules my enemies have set for the next wee while, that’s all.”

  He held up his arm, rolling his wrist to set the rowan charm swinging.

  Agnes pushed at the door. It shivered, and caught on the uneven ground, came free and scraped open. Cold air flowed gently over them as they stared into a short, dingy passageway with a low roof and undulating, unpaved floor.

  For an instant, at the touch of that air, a terrible, lurching dread ran through Quire. His hands trembled suddenly, and he was seized by the urge to flee. He steadied himself.

  “You feel something?” Agnes asked.

  “Aye.”

  “Not without its protections, this place,” she said, but offered no further explanation.

  She made to step across the threshold, but Quire barred her way with an outstretched arm.

  “I’ll go first,” he said.

  “Oh? Well, if it’ll make you happy.”

  She sounded faintly amused. Quire found her lack of a caution a little discomfiting. He had not told her of the pistol he had tucked inside his jacket, and did not mean to. Most places he went now, he went armed.

  It was colder in there than he had expected, like a cave. That shawl draped around Agnes’ head suddenly did not seem so redundant. The walls, when his fingertips brushed them, were damp to the touch. Hundreds of small webs were tucked into the edges of the ceiling. The floor had a disquieting hint of softness to it, the layers of dirt giving beneath his feet. Not a cave, not quite; a tomb. Quire felt himself to be disturbing a place that had been asleep for a long time.

  He advanced a few paces, accompanied in every step by that awful dread; that moaning fear within him, pleading with him to turn about and run. He could feel sweat upon his brow.

  Agnes lingered, just inside the doorway. He turned towards her, wondering for a moment whether she was overcome by the same gnawing unease that assailed him.

  “See?” she asked, gesturing at the crumbling wall of the passage.

  He looked where she pointed. Just barely, he could make out a thin line of some brownish, earthy material, running directly up the wall.

  “All the way round,” Agnes said, swinging her arm up and over.

  Now that Quire’s eye was tuned to it, he could see clear enough that the line did indeed traverse the ceiling, descend the opposite wall of the passage and run back across the floor to join with its own tail.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “A warding. Grave soil, I’d guess. It’s why you’re feeling set to piss yourself, and why you can’t stop thinking what a fine idea it’d be to get yourself out of here and never come back. Like as not, if it wasn’t for that wee twig at your wrist, you’d have run off already.”

  “Visitors aren’t welcome, then,” Quire murmured.

  “So it seems.”

  Quire pushed his way into a side room, through another stiff and resistant door. There were floorboards, almost lost beneath the drifts of soggy dust. They grumbled beneath him, yielding with murmurs of exhaustion. Dark smears were all over the walls, where water had come through to discolour the plaster and spread stains of mould. Patches of that plaster had fallen away, from walls and ceiling alike, littering the floor like plates of bark shed from a tree.

  Quire’s breath sounded loud to him. He stifled it, making himself calm. The air he drew carefully in tasted sour and stale, as if nothing had stirred it for years. There was a fire grate, rusted away and almost collapsed in on itself; a dull red and black skeleton of gnawed bones. Piles of crumbling wood that might once have been furniture, but it was impossible to say of what kind in the gloom.

  “I heard there was an old soldier rented it, a long while back,” Agnes said behind him, and her voice was so sudden that Quire started and gasped, and then put his hand to his brow to compose himself. He felt the subtle weight of the rowan charm against his sleeve.

  “So beat down he could find nowhere else for him and his wife to end their days,” Agnes went on. “First one to dare the place in a hundred years, and the last. Didn’t get past the first night, way the tale’s told.”

  “What happened?” Quire whispered.

  “Woke in their bed to a visitation. There’s different things I’ve heard. Some said they saw a calf, or a cat; familiars of the Devil, come seeking their dead master. Some said they saw Weir himself, standing right there watching them while they slept.” She sniffed. “Don’t much credit it myself.”

  Another room. Another musty silence. Quire shifted some of the detritus about with the toe of his boot. Each time he disturbed it, he smelled putrefaction, and the piss and dung of rats. In this chamber, there were roof beams stretched across the ceiling. They sagged. The vast weight of the tenement above, the lives being lived in it, bore down upon that small dark place.

  “What did he do?” Quire asked. “Weir, I mean. To get himself burned.”

  “I’d not think anyone could tell you that,” Agnes replied. “I ken what he was accused of: unnatural and perverse congress, with his sister and with beasts of the field. The corruption of those about him. The invocation of Satanic powers.”

  “Did he have children?”

  “Not that I ever heard.”

  “Blegg can’t be a descendant of his, then.”

  Muted light was seeping through another doorway. Quire went towards it, and looked through into a last room. There was a small window, caked with filth, in the far wall, but a door had been propped against it, blocking out most of the light. He eased it aside and scraped some of the dirt from the glass. The window let out into some boxed-in little square of flagstones, to which no doors, no passageways, gave access; a forgotten fragment of ground, engulfed by the city.

  Quire straightened, looked at the grime now clinging to his fingertips. He rubbed them thoughtfully on the leg of his trousers.

  “Someone’s been here,” Agnes said.

  Quire turned to look at her.

  “There’s footprints.”

  Now that there was more light reaching in, he could see them. Not a legible trail, but the rough impression of boots here and there on the grubby floor.

  “Place reeks of darkness,” Agnes said. “Evil spends long enough in one spot, it can never be right again.”

  She was only now starting to sound as uneasy as Quire had felt all along. He put his hand to his side, just tracing the shape of the pistol through his jacket. It was no great comfort. The oppressive atmosphere of Weir’s old house was not something that could be dispelled by a gun. Nor was the overwhelming sense of being an intruder, undesired and uninvited.

  There were sudden footfalls, muffled but distinct, above their heads. Quire tensed, and found himself reaching for the pistol despite himself. He froze, and Agnes did too, both of them standing there with their heads back, staring at the ceiling. The footsteps moved from one side of the room to the other, dwindling as they went, slipping away into silence.

  Quire puffed his cheeks out and let his hands hang loose.

  “Place’ll never be clean,” Agnes murmured. “Not unless it’s torn down. Burned.”

  “Who would come here?” said Quire, shaking his head.

  He found it difficult to imagine anyone voluntarily lingering for more than a few moments in a place so unsettling, so polluted. Even the most destitute, the most desperate, could find better hovels than this to doss down in.

  “No one,” Agnes agreed with his unspoken thoughts. “No one but the one who set that ward upon the door, eh? One who didn’t find it quite as foul a place as us ordinary folk do. One who liked it, even. Might be, if you’ve got the art to use it, there’s strength to be had here. It’d take a heart as black as the plac
e itself for that, though.”

  Quire walked slowly around the room, running a hand along the wall, prodding the corpse of a rat with his foot. There was a small pile of rags and rubble, with the broken spars of a shattered chair projecting from it. As he turned, his trouser leg caught upon the jagged end of one of those fragments of wood.

  Irritated, he bent down to unhitch the material. As it came free, he saw, still caught there on the splintered stub of wood, something that made him kneel, and lean close. He did not want to touch it, for the fear and trepidation still ran strong in him, but he did not need to.

  “Dog hairs,” he said quietly.

  “Dog hairs?” Agnes repeated.

  “There’s been dogs in here, and not so very long ago, most likely. One of them snagged themselves here, just as I did. It’s Ruthven, then. Maybe this is his idea of a kennel, for keeping his hounds when they’re not out on the farm. When they’ve got work to do in town, like Carlyle. Or me.”

  “Carlyle?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Let’s get ourselves out of here. This place is too much for me, rowan charm or no.”

  “You’ll not be getting an argument from me,” Agnes said, and led the way back, moving carefully through the short chain of rooms towards the passageway.

  As Quire followed her, he was distracted by a dull, frayed cloth tacked up to one of the walls. It hung there like a limp tapestry, its dismal form of a piece with the decrepitude of the house. An oddity. A purposeless elaboration. He tugged gently at it and it came away easily, bits of the wall itself crumbling out as the little nails slipped free.

  And Quire found himself staring into a face. The skin of a human face, nailed to the wall; hanging there, soft and horrible, without the structure of bone or muscle to give it shape. Eyelids, nose, cheeks, lips all sagging, a glove puppet taken from the hand it once covered and hung there like a gruesome trophy. For a moment, just a moment, he thought it a piece of worked calf hide, or vellum, formed by some craft he could not imagine into the mockery of a human visage; but he knew it was not. He knew it was precisely what it appeared to be. A man’s face, peeled from his skull.