James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

“You were just saying good day,” Keeble stated flatly. “You’ve got my answer. There isn’t any room for discussion.”

“No, I suppose there isn’t. I’m averse to discussion anyway. A waste of time. Very pretty daughter, that one. Fetching, you might say. You have three days.”

“I don’t need three days.”

“Thursday, let’s say. And do stay sober. This business will require all of your efforts, regardless of the outcome.” And with that, Drake raised his stick and neatly flipped Keeble’s nightcap from his head, turned, and strode through the yawning door. He climbed into the interior of a waiting brougham and was gone.

Keeble stood still for a moment, as if his blood had solidified. His neck and face were hot. Without turning his head he plucked up the cap from where it had fallen on the hall table. A door shut with a bang upstairs. Had Dorothy listened? Had she witnessed Drake’s departure? Keeble peered up the stairwell, a forced grin stretching his mouth. The stairs were empty. He pulled on the cloth cap and reached for the walrus tusk. There was really nothing to think about. Drake was all bluff. He wouldn’t dare come meddling round again. He’d be sorry for it if he did. Keeble’s hand shook as he drained the tusk, and he set it back onto the table uncapped. What did he care for threats? He stood thinking for a moment then tottered away up the stairs to bed.

The darkness of Hammersmith Cemetery was complete. Not a star shone in the clouded heavens, and the occasional gaslamps that burned in oval niches in the block wall of scattered crypts illuminated nothing but a few befuddled moths that stumbled out of the night, fluttered woodenly around the flame, then disappeared once again into darkness. A heavy river fog lay along the ground, and the old yew trees and alders whose bent branches shaded the grounds dripped moisture onto the neck and shoulders of Willis Pule, who clumsily stamped on the backside of a spade. He pulled the collar of his coat around his neck and cursed. His doeskin gloves were a ruin, and on the palm of his hand below his thumb a blister the size of a penny threatened to tear open.

He looked at his companion’s face. He loathed the man — doubly so for his poverty and stupidity. His face was expressionless. No, not entirely. There was a trace of fear on it, perhaps, a shimmer of dread at the sound of the sudden creaking of a limb overhead, at the sigh of rustling leaves. Pule smiled. He raised his left foot again and brought it down sharply on the spade. It slid off, and the shovel dug in a mere inch or two and canted to the side.

There was something utterly distasteful about this sort of work, but the evening’s prize couldn’t be trusted to the navvy alone. Why it was Pule who wielded the second spade and not Narbondo, Pule was at a loss to say. And if they were found out, there wasn’t a bit of doubt that the doctor and his dogcart would be long gone and that Pule would be left to explain himself to the constable. One day that would change. Pule stared through the gloom toward Palliser Road, but the tree trunks just ten yards hence were dark and ghostly in the fog, and the feeble light of his half-shrouded lantern seemed to make the surrounding headstones and crypts even dimmer and more obscure than they were.

The sudden chiming of a distant clock, low and sullen through the fog, startled him. He dropped his spade. A smile danced momentarily on his companion’s lips and eyes, and then was gone, replaced by the heavy dull slump of stolid indifference. Pule, seething, picked up his spade, grasped it near the base of its ash handle, and thrust it into the dirt. It penetrated several inches and then jammed to a sudden arm-chattering stop against a coffin lid. Pule grunted inadvertently with a thrill of pain and dropped the shovel.

His companion, never missing a stroke, skived the dirt from atop the box, his shovel glancing against the wood and scudding across it. The noises grated unnaturally loud in the heavy silence. Pule let his shovel lie. He’d had enough.

He bent once again over the headstone, cracked to bits years earlier and half covered with moss and mud. Fragments of it were gone altogether. The largest chunk, about a foot square, was cut with deep, angular letters that spelled out half a name — COTE — and below that the number 8 and the vine-draped shoulder of a carven skeleton. The remains of Joanna Southcote lay in the coffin. Her posturing son, himself almost a corpse, would be wild with joy over the worm-gnawed bones within. To Pule, one ruined skeleton pretty much resembled another.

The coffin seemed surprisingly solid for having sat so long in the ground; only one corner, from the look of it, had succumbed to the perpetual dampness and begun to rot, the wood separating into long, mushy fragments along grain lines. Pule’s companion clambered in beside the head end, dug around until he could get a purchase on the edges, and heaved it upward.

Pule grappled with it in an attempt to lever it further up out of the hole. The bottom of the coffin was wet in his hands, and his fingers smashed into clinging bits of mud and bugs. The coffin began to slide from his grasp, then gave suddenly with a sharp crack, the bottom boards splitting down the center and collapsing outward in a spray of debris, covering the face of the man in the hole. From the bottom of the coffin slid the gauze-wrapped corpse, rolling stiffly onto its side. Folds of rotten winding sheet ripped away to reveal long strands of webby hair standing away from a mouldering face. Little pouchlets of flesh hung from cheekbones like fungus on a decayed tree. Ivory bone beneath shone faintly in the lamplight.

Pule stood transfixed, holding in either hand shreds of the rotted boards. The man in the open grave appeared to be strangling. His face, twisted away from the gaping countenance of the corpse, seemed about to burst. With monumental resolve, he twisted from beneath the ghastly remains, edged sideways a few precious inches, and very slowly and deliberately hoisted himself out of the hole. Then he walked calmly and stiffly away toward the lighted crypts, disappearing finally in the fog.

Pule stifled an urge to shout at him and another to shout for Narbondo. He unrolled a tarpaulin onto the ground, set his teeth, climbed into the hole and grasped the shrouded skeleton round its arms. He hauled it out and onto the canvas, fold-ing the cloth around it, then set out toward the road, abandoning the light and dragging the tarpaulin across the wet grass, bumping over graves. The yawning black rectangle behind him vanished in mists through which glowed for a time the diffused yellow light of the veiled lantern.

Bill Kraken awoke to find himself in a strange bed. There was no confusion about it. He didn’t for a moment believe himself to be in his own shabby room. He felt pleasantly elevated, as if he were floating inches above the bed, and he heard a rushing sound in his ears that reminded him of a cold night he’d spent one early spring in a riverside cannery in Limehouse. But he wasn’t in Limehouse. And he was quite pleasantly warm beneath a feather comforter the likes of which he hadn’t seen for upwards of fifteen years.

His head felt enormous. He touched his forehead and discovered that it was wrapped like the head of an Egyptian mummy. And there was a dull ache in his chest, as if he’d been kicked by a horse. On a little table beside the bed lay a familiar book. He recognized the tattered ochre binding, a long fragment of which was curled back onto itself, as if someone had the nervous habit of rolling it between thumb and forefinger while reading. It was the Account of London Philosophers by William Ashbless. He picked it up happily and squinted at the cover. Dead in the center, as if it had been measured out, gaped a hole as round as the end of a finger. He opened the book, and page by page followed the little cavity down to a conical lead slug, its nose just touching the one hundred and eightieth page, stopping short of aerating a treatise on poetics. Kraken read half a page. It separated mankind into two opposing camps, like armies set to do battle — the poets, or wits, on the one side, and the men of action, or half wits, on the other. Kraken wasn’t certain that the philosophy was sound, but the refusal of the bullet to damage the page seemed to signify he would have to study it further.