“Well, that’s what we got here and that’s why were going armed. Not just for the Watch, but for them rats.”
“Ye think rats killed Slade and his brother?”
Clow handed him the reins and packed his clay pipe. “Aye. Rats it were. But not just any rats. I heard tell from Casket Jack down at the Gray Goat about this Russian bark what run aground in the canal two centuries ago, spilled its cargo right over the wharf. She was boarded, but there weren’t no living men aboard, nothing but skeletons and piles of bone that had been gnawed and worried upon. She came aground one dark October night and those that saw her said that hundreds and hundreds of rats came running out… big and gray and red-eyed… the size of cats, they said.” He struck a match off his fingernail and lit his pipe, clouds of smoke wafting over his shoulder. “Now, hear me on this, Mickey, these were no ordinary ship’s rats. They were big and fierce and they had killed the men on that ship, stripped ’em right to bones, the evil bastards. I heard this same story or something like it from me uncle Roy.”
Kierney said, “Rats that kill men… and eat them? Oh, it’s a fable, Sammy. Them rats feed on the dead, sure enough, and they’ll attack ye if yer too weak to fight back… but to take down healthy, able men? It’s a fable, sure it is.”
But Clow shook his head. “No, ye’ve me word on this, me fine old friend. Rats. Rats what out of hell. So we’ve come prepared to deal them a hurt, just look in the back of the wagon. See what ye might there.”
Holding a kerosene lantern aloft, Kierney pulled back the tarps and spilled aside the shovels and picks. The navy flintlock pistols were there, of course, but they had been joined by some heavier artillery: a blunderbuss with folding bayonet and an army .50-caliber smoothbore musket. Both, he saw upon closer examination, primed and powdered. And next to them, wrapped in oilcloth, a ten-pound shank of pork and a wooden box filled with dead fish.
“What the hell, Sammy? Are we having ourselves a picnic tonight or are we fighting a war?”
Clow laughed. “The guns is to protect ourselves with. I’m thinking that blunderbuss can kill quite a few rats, its shot packed with tiny nails as it is. And the food? Well, don’t be handling it without gloves, for there’s enough strychnine in them goodies to kill a hundred men and mayhap a colony of evil rats.”
Without further ado, Clow outlined his plan, which he thought was a good one. They were going to the North Grounds to fish out the body of a handsome young girl who had succumbed to a gas leak, been found dead in the morning by her mother. That was what they were going to do. Dr. Gray would be very happy at such a fine and healthy specimen of eighteen years without a spot of damage. And if while they were there, this ravenous colony of rats showed, they would give them a taste of ball and powder, send ’em running.
“And if we find some of them burrows under the ground? Why, we’re going to set out our bait and kill the bastards and their brood.”
Kierney thought about it. “It sounds a fair plan and surely I’m game.”
“Me uncle Roy said they did it out to Ramshorn,” Clow told him. “Them rats he spoke of… a horrid and foul throng they were. They infested the burial grounds, overrunning not only the aboveground vaults and crypts, but literally honeycombing the earth itself with their tunnels, chewing their way into boxes, and devouring the corpses. Oh, a profanity it surely was.”
“And they poisoned them?”
“Aye, it was the only way. Great sections of the graveyard were collapsing from all that digging going on beneath.” Clow pulled at his wipe. “By this point, why, the sextons and caretakers were not above employing anyone who could help. So they turned to the resurrectionists. And old Uncle Roy? Did he help them? Why, sure he did. He right away knew what to do.”
“Baiting them?”
“Aye, but just not baiting them like any old rat catcher, but baiting them with what they loved best… corpses. Dozens of corpses injected full of poison. The rats got to ’em, and in the following weeks, no more rats.”
Kierney shook his head. “Is this a true story?”
“Why, sure it is.”
“Aye, but at the Glasgow High Churchyard, Sammy, no rats burrowed into that mausoleum… no rats made a burrow like that. It were something else.”
“Well, then,” Clow said, “perhaps tonight we’ll find out what.”
The North Burial Grounds was a city of the dead.
Soon as you came through the gates you saw that. In every which direction, tombs. High and low, set into mounds and atop hills. Some were gray and crumbling and covered in wild ivies and vines, sinking into the moist earth, and others stood tall and white and pristine. And between them, slabs and obelisks and marble crosses, intensely crowded gravestones and narrow peaked monuments. Here were dark gray headboard-shaped tombstones with weeping angels and winged death’s heads. Rectangular stones set with rosettes, spades, and hourglasses. And among them, ornate limestone ovals and tall slate half-ovals embellished with skulls and serpents and half-moons. And all of it lorded over by death angels spreading their marble wings and tall, brooding skeletons gripping scythes, their skull faces threaded in cobweb and grave fungi.
“Very quiet,” Kierney said as Clem pulled them through the snaking roads and between stands of craggy black oaks. “Just the way I like it.”
There was a wind, and it was especially chilly here. The trees were stripped of foliage, the byways and footpaths plastered with wet leaves.
“Just ahead,” Clow said, “near to the pauper’s field.”
They both kept an eye out for the Churchyard Watch but saw nothing that concerned them. They passed a silent watchtower and it was dark, festooned with creeping shadows, lifeless as the burial yard itself. Clow reined Old Clem to a stop beneath a pool thrown by interlocking tree branches above.
“Now to business,” he said, his breath frosting in the chill air.
They meandered through the gardens of stones and around leaf-blown sepulchers, pausing at a morbid winged seraph that was very old, its features worn and indistinct. Clow, gripping a spade and pick, sniffed the air for the scent of fresh earth and found it nearly right away. Just on the other side of a wild expanse of bushes shivering in the wind.
“Here she is,” he said, sighting a fresh headstone. “Here’s our girl.”
Kierney brushed leaves away from the grave, tossed aside a funeral wreath, wound his scarf tighter around his throat, and set his hat atop a pointed monument. “Well, me love, we’ll get ye out of that awful place and quick we will.”
He rubbed his hands together to drive the cold out and spread the tarp next to the grave. He pulled on his dirty apron. Then, spade in hand, he began to dig. The ground was very loose, only lightly packed by feet stomping about. It took him about ten minutes to square off the upper half of the grave, dumping clods of earth onto the stretched tarp. Then the real digging began. Since they had Clem with them, it would be necessary to expose only the top of the coffin. Then they could snap the lid and fish their treasure out.
They worked in shifts, first Kierney digging feverishly and expertly while Clow kept watch. When he was down three feet, Clow took over. When he reached the lid and brushed away the dirt, exalting as always in the rich smell of soil, he climbed up out of the grave.
“Make ready, Mickey. I’ll bring Clem around.”
Kierney tossed aside his coat and jumped down into the grave, inserting the broad hooks firmly beneath the lid, arranging the sacking to muffle the sound of the cracking. The casket shifted beneath his weight, but he thought nothing of it. He waited for Clow. Through that cramped opening above, he could see the denuded tree branches scraping together beneath the eye of the moon. A gust pushed leaves up into the air and dozens of them settled down into the grave.