Clow liked that.
He’d been thinking along those same lines. For if you left a dead dog to silently rot in the gutter, it drew flies and worms and crawly things, did it not? And couldn’t that be applied to the graveyards of men? That sooner or later, with all that rancid beef lying about, something would be drawn? Something would be generated? Something would be born in those dark, stinking depths, something with teeth and a mortuary appetite?
The idea of this had been growing in his mind for a long time, that places of death were also places of fungous, seething life. Maybe it took a corpse-grabber or a death-fisher to see it, to understand the verminous organic vitality that existed down in the tombs and hollows and catacombs. For it was there… the rank moisture and gassy heat and bubbling putrefaction. That while aboveground mourners walked with stiff hide masks for faces and black holes for eyes… and as the grave robbers and resurrection men followed in wakes of human ash and grave-filth with shovels in their hands… down below, there was a great putrefying womb steaming with corpse-drainage and carrion and floral decay and it was only a matter of time before that womb expelled some unspeakable creeping embryo born of dripping tombs and rotting coffins.
And now it had happened.
Or perhaps the Corpse King had been birthed centuries before, slinking through Roman death house or Celtic bone pile or Gaelic excarnation chamber where the flesh was allowed to rot from the dead so that the skeleton could be worshipped. Perhaps it had existed that long or longer or maybe it was just the graven, sepulchral progeny of such things.
Who could say?
Regardless, in some arcane and mystical way, Clow had been waiting for such a thing to make an appearance. And now that it had, he felt that his fate was somehow tied to its own.
That in the end, he would know the charnel embrace of the Corpse King.
Dr. Gray said he had need of a young woman, preferably in her early twenties or late teens, for a demonstration of female reproductive anatomy. Clow was only too happy to oblige. Within a few days, he found what he was looking for at St. Martin’s Cemetery. A heavy, cumbersome mortstone had been placed over the grave, and it took all of two hours to move it aside sufficiently to get at the grave.
“Oi, me back,” Kierney said when they were finished. “If you would be so kind as to pull them nails out… right into me spine, they are.”
Clow said, “I feel ’em, too, but mine are spikes what from the railroad.”
“Did I say nails? Skewers is what they are, a baker’s dozen right in me back, driven through with a hammer.”
They sat on a nearby slab and had themselves a pipe and a touch of rum. The night had gone chill and dark, the moon lodged in a bank of feathery caliginous clouds the color of coal dust. St. Martin’s was a hilly run of close-packed headstones, leaning this way and that, riding the hills like squat, flattened fence posts. The last time they had been here, some weeks before, they discovered a group of resurrectionists already digging. Tonight, they were alone.
They knew they had a job ahead of them. The Churchyard Watch was out in such numbers that it was too dangerous to bring the horse and buckboard with them. So they would have break open the coffin themselves, then cart the body away on foot. No easy nor enjoyable matter on a damp, cold night where the wind went right through a man.
“On with it, then,” Clow said.
They started digging. St. Martin’s was no different from any dozen other graveyards in the area—saturated. The rains had come again, washing the last of the autumn color from the trees and leaving the world gray and leaden. The soil was wet and heavy, like shoveling mud. It was very slow going and they worked in shifts. Each square foot of earth was a labor that drove those nails and spikes deeper into their backs and by the time they struck the box, Kierney could barely straighten up.
“If, six months from now,” he said, leaning against his spade, “you should find me on some street corner, hunched over and broken, selling flowers, trouble yourself not about it, Samuel Clow. For I bear you no ill will for breaking me fucking back.”
“Kind of you, I say.”
“It’s the way I am,” Kierney said as Clow scraped away the dirt from the upper third of the coffin lid. “All me life I’ve had a soft heart. It’s been me downfall, me charitable and God-fearing ways.”
“Aye, that it has.”
Clow secured the hooks and they took the ropes and began pulling and yanking, straining and swearing. Shrouded in sackcloth as usual, the lid gave only a dull report as it went. Like a snapped board heard miles distant. Clow cleaned the splinters away and, together, they began to drag the body up and up. The lady was wrapped up snugly in her moist cerements and it took some doing to get her up and out of that box.
“Let’s have a look,” Kierney said, pulling his penknife and preparing to slit the cerecloth.
“Aye, we should—”
“You, there!” a voice cried out. “Grave robbers! You halt right now and stop what you’re doing!”
Before either of them could do much but turn and look, a figure dashed in their direction with a lantern held high. Kierney stood and a shot rang out like thunder in those silent environs. He made a choking sound and folded up without another noise. The watchman got in close and Clow brought the blade of his shovel down on the man’s head. When he found the ground, Clow kept at it until his head was nearly split like a gourd.
He gave the dead man a kick. “What’s that, guv? Tired, are you? Prefer to lay and take a nap? That’s fine, just fine.” He went down on his knees by Kierney, pulled his old friend up, saw the twin streams of blood running down his chin, the wetness at his chest. In the dappled lantern light, he could see that Kierney’s eyes were open. “All right, love, all right, let’s have none of that, now, shall we? Can you speak? Can you tell me… oh, dear Christ, Mickey Kierney, not this, you’re not doing this to me, are you? You’re not leaving me alone now, for I wouldn’t know what to do without you, oh, give us a wink or a smile, oh, Mickey, oh, my friend, oh, not this…”
Clow had to leave him.
Others were coming… and in numbers.
He took their tools and threw the bundled-up woman over his shoulder and stalked off into the night. He left more behind than Kierney’s cooling remains, but a good part of his heart and soul and so many things he would never properly know.
Then the night had him and from his own throat he heard a wracked sobbing.
It was later and Clow was drunk and in a foul mood.
Soon as he stepped in the door of the Seven Keys, he heard his mother’s voice calling to him. He was not in the mood. Not in the mood for anything at that point, and the old cow should have known it by the look on his face. But she was well into her cups, and sensitivity was not among her natural rhythms.
Looking upon her, he hated.
And somehow, yes, he blamed the old witch for the dire event his life had become through the years. Yes, he looked upon her, and she was everything he had endured, everything he had missed or wanted and been denied. She was the cancer of his existence that had been chewing a hole through his belly from day one.
“What the fuck ye looking at, ye great scab?” she said to him.
Clow laughed.
And kept laughing.
He was remembering their flat as a boy after his father had gone. The two stinking rooms, his sisters and he living off crusts of bread and turnip tops while his mother drank the money she lifted her skirts for. He could see the flat, the narrow bed he shared with his sisters, feel the coarse sheets and the bite of the bugs that infested the mattress, hear his mother’s squeals and groans from the other room. He could smell the woodsmoke and mildew, feel the creeping dampness and see the cracked plaster and the fine layer of black soot that lay over everything. Overflowing piss buckets. Dead rats under the beds and in the cupboards. The stink of the clogged sewers below and the public well that seeped gray water. He could feel the cold rain dripping through holes in the roof and smell the fevers of his sisters, hear them coughing out wads of phlegm and blood. The rats scratching in the walls. He could see his sisters’ dirty, scabbed feet, feel the badly worn clothes he wore that the other children laughed at. Yes, that was his life as a boy. Always hungry, always tired, always sick and hurting. Watching his siblings sicken and die, one after the other.