Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

There was a pen filled with grunting pigs out front, happily feeding on rubbish. Their stench, combined with that of the nearby open sewer, made Clow certain he could be nowhere but home.

Each morning he woke, pissed into the chamber pot, and looked out the dirty mullioned window, seeing nothing below but pigs and sewage, much of it walking on two feet. The sunlight never ventured far into his room, which was overrun by greasy shadows and cobwebs. But the view… now, that was special, wasn’t it? The maze of stacked tenements, the dirty, narrow streets running through them, the shadowed alleys and dismal closes and steaming gutters. It was a fine view.

After a bit of drunken fumbling at the latch, Clow and Kierney fell through the door and right to the floor, laughing all the while. The walls were cracked and dripping with moisture, the stink of cod-liver candles and garbage thick in the air. In the dirty parlor by kerosene lamp waited the Widow Clow.

They both offered her courtly bows and she sneered at them. “There you are, you wee squirt of bile,” she said to her son. “Gone all night a-drinking and a-whoring you are, leaving me here to deal with those vermin friends of yours. I canna think of a bigger waste of flesh and space than you, Sammy Clow.”

Irene Clow was known alternately as the Widow Clow or Old Witch Clow. And a crone she certainly resembled. At barely five feet, she weighed in at an easy fifteen stone, a great lolling slug of a woman pressed into a sackcloth dress. Her left eye had been lost in a drunken brawl and she wore a leather patch over it. As things stood, she had one more tooth than eyes.

“And you, Mickey Kierney,” she said, swallowing down her pint, “your mum should have kept her legs crossed rather than retch out a scab like you.”

Her son laughed a high, tittering sound. “Aye, she’s a saucy bit of rash, me dear mum.” He turned to Kierney. “Have you met me dear mother, son?”

“Aye, a fine lady she is—”

“Piss off, the both of you!” she said, slamming one meaty fist to the table. “Next you’ll be wanting to lick me backside on Sunday, you bastards, you dirty, thievin’, corpse-snatching bastards! You’d both rot in hell, if I was to have my say.”

Kierney raised an eyebrow. “If you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Clow, your mother has a wee bit of an evil tongue.”

“That she does.”

“Her language pales me some and sets me withers to trembling… me being a fine upstanding Christian what says his prayers by morn and night and abstains from vice as the vicar says.”

Clow nodded sadly. “Aye, she’s got the Devil’s own hands in her, she does. But a fine, upstanding woman all the same. Many’s the time I’ve seen the Virgin Mother herself in me dear mother,” he said. “Seems she’s a bit long in tooth this night… what could be troubling the old whore?”

“Her piles, me thinks,” Kierney decided. “Giving her a bad turn, they are.”

A glass flew between them and shattered against the doorway. “Fuck you both, you slimy, mud-gupping warts! Out of me house with you, I say! Out, out, out! And down to your cellar with your corpses and dead ones, that’s fine company for the likes of you! Down there in that disgusting smell…”

“Now, Mum, quit holding a candle to the Devil and be of God and grace,” Clow said, tossing a half-pence into her lap. “I’ve brought ye a shiny new mag for your trouble; spend it where you would.”

Kierney crossed himself. “No doubt she’ll be giving it to the poor, Samuel Clow. A fine and pure woman is your mum.”

“Ye rancid prick! Out of me sight with you!” the widow shouted.

“And that voice,” Clow said, “’tis but the gentle coo of a dove…”

Yes, that was Clow’s mother.

She was evil and mean-spirited, but he put up with her… or perhaps she put up with him. He never knew which. As a child, while she fell to whoring and drinking, just about everything was dumped into the lap of Clow and his sisters. It was they who fetched buckets of water from the public well and carried them up five flights of stairs. They what scavenged for firewood, tinder, and lumps of coal. They that hunted among the market stalls with the other grimy street children, searching for a stray turnip or potato that had fallen into a crevice, or perhaps pig ribs or oxtails from the slaughteryards. Anything to make a thin soup with, something to fill their bellies while their mother drank, grunting and puffing in the bedroom with a gentleman caller.

“Good night to ye, me mother,” Clow said, another glass shattering on the wall where his head was a few moments before.

They left her swearing, cursing the day she let Clow’s poor dead father have his filthy way with her and cursing herself for not strangling baby Sammy fresh out of the womb. They went down a set of sweating stone steps and Clow unlocked a heavy plank door and in they went, greeted by a pungent, foul odor of carrion, salts, and drainage.

“Me private sanctum sanctorum, Mickey Kierney. That where I do a good part of me business,” Clow said.

They lit oil lamps and their surroundings swam into view from the murk, the flickering yellow-orange light revealing the gruesome stock the two had laid in. Two long scathed tables were piled with human bones—vertebrae and rib cages, femurs, ulnas, tibias. Shelves along the far wall held a grim collection of undamaged skulls, from adult to infant and everything in between. Here were cadavers of every age and sex packed in sawdust and hay, sunk in wooden casks and barrels of brine. Here were babies pickled in bottles and salted limbs heaped in cupboards. Staring heads had been salted and women injected with preservative. They waited against the walls like mummies and leered from corners with rictus grins. A great assemblage of charnel harvest awaiting the highest bidder, supply and demand. Like the grisly pantry of a cannibal.

“Aye, I look around me workshop and see coins spilling from every recess, I do. Enough here, I say, to give any forty anatomists a hardening and quivering of their private parts. Would you agree, Mickey Kierney?”

“I would,” Kierney said, pulling a lid off a cask and pouring a bit of grain alcohol from a dusty bottle onto the bobbing head of a woman.

“And look here, would you?” Clow said. “Me latest offerings.”

He approached a table with two small forms shrouded in a graying sheet. Carefully, he pulled the sheet back, revealing the cadavers of two four-year-old twin girls, cold as clay, eyes gummed shut, tiny stiff hands pressed over white bosoms.

“Oh, me fine darlings, look at you, look at the wonder of you,” Clow said, pouring himself a tin cup of gin and toasting them. “Your mother decided she would strangle you, did she? Decided life was better without you, eh? Well, no matter, me and Mr. Kierney will whisk you off to the medical college at first light. You’ll be in good hands there, I say. Better than the moss and crawlies of the churchyard, I be thinking.” Clow stroked their sunken faces, brushed a stray strand of hair away from the one on the left and cooed to the other, drawing a finger over her seamed, blackened lips. “Sssh, sssh, me doves, me lovies, me fine little darlings. We’ll have none of that, now, will we? Samuel Clow will take fine care of you, he will.”

Together, Clow and Kierney gently lowered the bodies of the girls into a vat of brine to hold them over until delivery. Their blond curls skated over the surface for a moment, then sank from view.

“Bless ye, me angels,” Clow said, closing the lid of the vat.

Then he sat about with Kierney and the dead, spinning tales and making plans and mapping out the busy weeks ahead. For as long as God was on their side, they decided, there was no end in sight. The doctors wanted the beef and they were the men who could offer them a fine selection for even the most discriminating anatomical palate.