Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

Least that’s what the stories said.

“Me mother said this was where the witches held their Sabbath, amongst the graves and flooded hollows… do you put much in that, Samuel Clow?” Kierney said, whispering.

“There’s only money waiting to be taken,” Clow told him, not a speck of humor or good cheer in his voice. He urged Old Clem down the winding muddy road, eyes looking for things and he wasn’t even sure what, exactly. “Now hold your tongue, Mickey.”

What they needed was silence here.

The High Churchyard was known to be patrolled by members of the Churchyard Watch Association, armed groups of men who would shoot down grave robbers or stretch their necks on the spot. They hid among the trees and peered from the gun ports of the tall, cylindrical watch houses, long rifles in hand. Clow could see the watch house in the distance. It looked like a turret from a medieval castle. He saw no lights, but that didn’t mean no one was around. The High Churchyard had been a favorite haunt of the body-snatchers right back to the days of Burke and Hare, and it was now, these many years later, still closely guarded. The evidence was everywhere—table-topped graves, iron mort-safes, and stone vaults. Anything to keep the snatchers from fishing out fresh corpses. Graves were sometimes booby-trapped and/or stood sentinel by members of the deceased’s family for a few weeks until the remains were far too corrupted to be of use on the dissection slabs.

But tonight, all seemed quiet.

Old Clem spluttered and shook, did not like where they were, but Clow urged him onward, beneath the latticing of dark branches overhead. The horse moved forward, hooves splashing through puddles, the wagon creaking behind. The ground fog was so perfectly seamless that it looked as if Clem was plodding through a foot of fresh, powdery snow.

The air was damp and chill, yet Clow was sweating. Rivulets of perspiration ran down his face and his breath was sharp in his lungs. Clenching his teeth and he knew not what against, he worked the reins, forever watching among the old tombs and riven slabs, sensing something out there. Not necessarily movement but a gnawing sense that eyes were on them, watching and scrutinizing. He hadn’t felt this nervous since his uncle Roy had taken him along on his first snatching. He tried to shake it… that almost palpable sense of being watched, eyes peering from shadows and clusters of graves… but it was no good.

“What’s bothering ye, Sammy? Christ, but I can feel it over here,” Kierney said in a low, cautious voice.

Clow shook his head. “Not sure, but something don’t feel right.”

“Aye… is it the sense of being watched?”

Clow looked over at him in the darkness. “You, too?”

“Aye, right down into me balls.” Kierney was looking around fearfully now, too. “I’m feeling me mother rolling in her grave, for soon I’ll be joining the dear old cunt.”

In his line of work, Clow had gradually lost all fear of the dead. Superstition was something a corpse-snatcher soon dispensed with or he found another job. But tonight, it had all returned… those boyish fears of dark places and lonely cemeteries, creeping things that reached from shadows.

As he looked around, his skin was literally crawling, his throat tightening down to a pinhole. He could barely breathe. Yes, it was there, out there somewhere, among the sepulchers and tombstones, the very thing that was inspiring this terror in his guts, in his marrow, in deep and forbidding places at the bottom of his soul. At times, the feeling of eyes on him was almost too much. It made him shake and sweat, certain he would scream. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought the dead were rising, misting from their graves, grinning and whispering, waiting to get their teeth into his soft white throat.

Yes, something was out there, but it was not the rising dead.

Not exactly.

Clow kept watching among the netted shadows, the stumps, and crowded headstones, thinking he might catch sight of whoever or whatever was dogging them, but maybe hoping he wouldn’t at all.

Kierney cleared his throat of dust. “I’m thinking there’s no people here, Sammy, but that we’re not alone.”

Clow ignored that. “The vault we seek is just yonder that thicket ahead.”

The narrow dirt road cut through the thicket, which was dim and shadowy even on a bright day, but was positively black and depthless by night. The grotesque shapes of oaks and maples and yews grew to either side, their branches overhanging the road, dense and interwoven. Their trunks were thick, limbs seeming to be growing into one another, coiling roots dislodging ancient graves that appeared to be arranged almost in a geometrical pattern.

Clow saw the vault ahead limned by wan moonlight.

In either direction, hog-backed gravestones, sunken slabs, and leaning crosses climbed hills, fell down into hollows, and were consumed by the wild and knotted undergrowth. Dozens of vaults were set into hillsides or atop the low mounds of ridges, lost beneath crowns of creeping ivy. The vault they wanted was set out among the markers, huge and gray and wreathed in shadow.

Clow pulled Clem to a stop and then Kierney and he just looked around, still feeling like they were being watched or stalked, but not so badly as before. It was almost to the point where they could write it all off as imagination.

Hopping out of the wagon, Clow produced a set of skeleton keys.

“Where did ye get them fine keys, Samuel Clow?”

Clow tried to smile, but it came off badly this night. “The fine family what owns this vault were kind enough to lend them to me, bless them one and all.” He paused. “Or perhaps it were their maid, cheeky thing that one. In a rare moment of depravity, I got the fine girl drunk on rum and bitters, took her to bed, and had me way with her. It was she who got these keys for us. Remember her in yer prayers, old friend.”

“I would at that, Mr. Clow,” Kierney told him. “Taking away the girl’s virtue like that, ah, ye rank bastard. Stealing the fine blossom of her womanhood. Ye should be ashamed, ashamed!”

“I was, certainly I was… that is, until I learned that her blossom had been picked, and more than once, by diverse hands. And here I was, fine upstanding Christian lad that I am, wanting to marry the old haybag, only to learn that her garden was well traversed. Taken advantage of by a cheap woman, I was.”

“Ah, ye poor thing,” Kierney said, clapping him on the shoulder. “What will yer mother be thinking?”

Clow pulled a lantern from the back of the wagon. “She’ll be disappointed, that evil fat sow.”

They moved off side by side through the legions of headstones and funerary crosses. The smiling faces of carved winged seraphs were covered with cauls of lichen. The ground was still marshy from the heavy rains several days previous, the body-snatcher’s hobnailed boots sinking into the mold and rank soil. They leaped over sunken graves that were filled with standing water and floating leaves.

As they rounded a collection of marble-hewn shafts and attendant cinerary urns, Kierney adjusted the canvas sacks thrown over his shoulder and said, “I been thinking I’m not liking these awful places you take me. This may be the last—”

“Quiet,” Clow said, his head cocked to the side.

“What?”

“Quiet, ye great heap!”

Kierney narrowed his eyes, peering around in the darkness. The countless stones around them looked almost luminous, tangled in wisps of ground fog. Through the interlaced tree branches above, the moon was deathly pallid like a waxen face. Kierney swallowed, listened. Yes, he could hear something now, too. Something big moving through the burial yard, underbrush crackling and branches splitting, a sound like some immense serpentine form was sliding among the gravestones.