Yes, that’s right, Sammy. And you remember what was looking up at you as you looked down from above?
Kierney stepped among the decomposing bones and skulls threaded with fungi. He found the remains of fresher corpses… limbs and trunks, most badly worried. A complete cadaver was settled in the corner, a fine mesh of mildew growing over its face. Its head lolled at a sickening angle from the neck and its chest seemed to have been crushed. In fact, the entire body had been smashed with such pressure that viscera had been forced from its mouth. Beetles crawled all over it, tunneling into it.
“That… that face,” Kierney said. “I recognize it… it’s—”
“Keith Strand,” Clow said. “He disappeared a few weeks back, maybe a month.”
The stench of the chamber was roiling and hot and nauseating. Like sticking your face into the slit belly of a putrescent corpse… and inhaling. It was that revolting, that physically appalling.
And you stay here much longer, Clow told himself, and you’ll know worse. You’ll know something much, much worse.
He knew it to be true. For already the chamber and tunnel system was filling with a presence, a palpable sense of something immense and rancid and spiritually evil. It made his guts clench like a fist, bile squirt up the back of his throat.
Kierney said, “I think we’d best be getting on our way, Sammy.”
Clow was in complete agreement. The tunnel ahead sloped down and down, farther into the earth and maybe straight down into the bowels of hell, for all he knew. All he was certain of was that he honestly did not want to find out.
About then the chamber began to vibrate. The walls shook and clots of earth began to fall around them as if a cave-in was beginning. The mucky, slopping ground under their feet thrummed as if a train was approaching.
Yes, something was coming.
Clow froze up, feeling the musket in his fists and wondering if he’d have the steel to use it when the time came. For surely, that time was coming. There was about to be a dire intersection of fates—theirs and that of the thing that crawled beneath graveyards.
Kierney muttered something.
The sound was getting louder, the tunnel vibrating so wildly now they could barely stay on their feet. Earth was dropping all around them. A skull dislodged itself from above and conked Kierney on the head. But it did not faze him. Nothing could touch either of them, they were too transfixed by that malignant other barreling through catacombs of rot and bones to get at them. Everything was trembling and canting, like an earth tremor was rising and rising from far below.
Kierney grabbed Clow by the arm and, together, they ran.
It took them not even five minutes to make it back to the dangling rope that Clow had tied off above, but it seemed an eternity with the ground shaking and that roaring, screeching noise behind them as the thing got closer and closer.
“Up the rope, Sammy!” Kierney said.
But as terrified as Clow was, he would not hear of it. “Ye first and right now, ye silly git!”
Kierney took one last look at his old friend and jumped on the rope, moving up it quickly and into the grave. Clow set the lantern at his feet, that roaring having become deafening now. Oh, yes, it was certainly coming and something in him died at the idea of facing it. It pushed a hot wave of putrefaction before it like warm, spoiled meat. And he heard other things… a clicking and a slithering, a dry rustling and a moist undulation. Whatever the Corpse King was, it was many things joined in a lurid danse macabre.
“Sammy! Up the rope!” Kierney called from above. “Do ye hear me? Up the fucking rope, ye ripe bastard!”
Clow heard him, all right.
But he could not move.
He brought the smoothbore musket up, his fingers oily on it. In the distance, in the flickering light of the lantern, he could make out a huge, rising swell rolling in his direction. Something that chattered a thousand teeth like roofing nails and clattered a million yellowed bones…
He saw two brilliant red eyes.
He fired the musket and the report was deafening, overwhelming. The muzzle flash saved him, though, for it blinded him to what came slinking and coiling out of the tunnel, something that would have driven him stark, screaming mad.
“Sammy!”
Clow was on the rope, sliding right up it, afraid that he would lose his grip and fall into the easy grasp of that noxious, undulating nightmare. But he did make it up, and once in the grave itself, Kierney’s strong hands yanked him up into the air and the world itself.
And then they were running, finding Old Clem and hooking that wagon up quicker than they thought was possible.
All around them, the cemetery was quaking and rolling, stones falling and crypts swaying, tree limbs falling everywhere. They raced out of the boneyard, a row of graves collapsing as the thing rocketed through the earth trying to catch them.
But once again, they made it.
“Never, ever again,” Kierney panted ten minutes later, “will we go into that cursed place.”
And to that, Clow could only silently agree.
But it was a lie and Clow well knew it.
Maybe Kierney could not see that or feel it down into his bones, but Clow did. Because, sooner or later, they would need to make a snatch, and if what they needed wasn’t available elsewhere, then they would follow the trail of money back to the North Grounds.
They wouldn’t have been the first.
For maybe Johnny Sherily with so many years sprawled lazily behind him and so much wisdom bottled and corked on the crowded shelves of his brain could turn his back on greed, but he was a rarity. There were few in the business that did not despise the handling of the dead, but they did it again and again for the money, for the pounds and pence and the easy, high life such things provided. Sometimes the work was dirty and despicable and downright sickening, but the money brought them back again and again. Just as it brought diggers back to the North Grounds even when they knew it was the lair of the corpse-eater.
The next afternoon, whiling away these thoughts, Clow walked with Kierney through the narrow wynds and closes of Old Town. The streets were noisy and bustling with carriages and livestock, horses and barking dogs, barrows and stray pigs. Children dodged about barefoot, trying to pick the pockets of merchants or simply chasing hoops about. Soldiers in red tunics chatted with prostitutes. Drunken women lounged in doorways, bawling dirty children at their feet. Traders were selling bread and pork and fish, turnips and potatoes. The cobbles were gray with horseshit, bits of straw, and standing pools of water. A couple girls selling flowers were splashed with mud by a passing hansom, and Clow and Kierney laughed. For straightaway they were no longer little angels but foul-mouthed creatures insinuating that the driver’s mother had lain with barnyard stock to produce something like him.
“It were some night we had ourselves, weren’t it, Mickey?” Clow said.
“Oi, I would call it a horrible night.” He shook his head. “Never will ye drag me to the North Grounds again.”
They walked in silence until they reached the brick archway that led to the close where the Seven Keys was to be found. You could not see the sky overhead, so much washing was strung between the high buildings.
Clow sighed. “What do you suppose it is, Mickey? A beasty? A boggle? A devil from hell?”
Kierney spit tobacco juice at a couple children panhandling. “Aye, all that and neither. I was thinking on it, since the bastard has stolen away me sleep again, and I think that this Corpse King is all that which a graveyard could be. Do ye follow me on this? He is graves and worms, corpses and rot, slime and shrouds and rats and mourning and grief… all of that stirred up in a big greasy black pot, simmered and steamed. And when the lid comes off that foul mess, well, then you’ve got our Corpse King. Something not dead but not alive. A hunger and an evil and a misting black death.”