Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

And sometimes, upon waking, he was certain something had been in his room, something slimy and immense and oozing, something that had pulled away into the shadows as his eyes opened. Something with huge red eyes burning into him like red-litten gas lamps seen through a charnel mist.

But when he opened his eyes, there was nothing but the tick of a deathwatch beetle secreted in the walls and that invasive, gassy stench he could not explain or maybe did not want to. Just a miasma seeping up from the cellar, that’s all it was.

He was alone, alone.

At least, as alone as he ever was after that night in the vault.

Whatever they had seen or felt that night, it began to pale in the rush of grimy days that was life in the Irish slums of Cow Gate and West Port. Days came and went like notions, bleeding into one another, piling up atop the remains of the last until that night became fuzzy and out of focus and they could not be certain what it was that had happened.

“Could be them gases coming from the dead ones, Sammy,” Kierney said as they made their way to the Grassmarket for a bit of public amusement. “I’m thinking it could be. I’ve heard tell that the vapors from them dead ones often affect a mind and put it to thinking terrible things. Do you think it could be, Samuel Clow?”

Clow liked it. He took what was offered by his friend, chewed it up, and found that it laid in his belly just fine. “I think you’re right, Mickey Kierney. Could be nothing else. Ghosts and spooks and creepy-crawlies… aye, but a load of filth is all it is. You’re a wise sort, you are.”

Which meant, they both knew, that they were going to be doing some digging again. It had been two weeks now. Still, some coin had been turned moving the stock down in Clow’s cellar. Some of it had turned and was most evil-smelling, but much of it had fetched a good price. The truly ripe cadavers were boiled by them into fine white skeletons and, as luck would have it, a local undertaker was bribed for a few shillings to turn his back while Clow and Kierney snatched the body of a carnival giant from the mortuary. Such oddities always brought a good price.

Still, though, it was dry.

Time had passed and the anatomist’s slabs were empty and it was time to get back out into the harvest fields, to fish up some stock for Surgeon’s Hall, and they were ready.

But it was a sad day at the Grassmarket, for it was time to bid a fond farewell to one of the finest sack-’em-up men ever to haunt the kirks and burial yards of Edinburgh and Glasgow—Leaky Baker. He was no friend of either Clow nor Kierney; still, they came to see the poor man off. To see him get that which had been coming to him for some time. Among the body-snatchers of West Port, there was not a dry eye to be had in the gin houses when they learned that Leaky had been arrested by the King’s men and found guilty over to the judiciary courthouse of the crime of murder, a hanging offense. No, nary a dry eye, for everyone gathered had laughed their asses off.

Bobby Swinburne, an old hand in the snatching business who’d apprenticed under Ben Crouch in London, put it this way: “By Christ, the old crapper is getting his just, is he? About fucking time, I say. I’ll be there when he swings, sure I will. You’ll see me dance a jig and shake me prick at him. Happy, I’ll be.”

Baker had delivered the corpse of a young, attractive woman to the Royal Infirmary of Glasgow, never knowing she’d been carrying typhus. The entire staff had been infected. Baker was duly incarcerated in the death cell at Calton Jail, whereupon the lord provost threw together an unimpeachable case against him… helped along by Baker’s assistant, of course, who turned King’s evidence. There was no honor among thieves and less among body-snatchers. They robbed and cheated each other on a regular basis, but Leaky Baker had made a career of it. He had been stabbed three times as a result, surviving each time to brag of his exploits, but there would be no surviving the noose.

“Aye, but it could happen,” Clow said, enjoying the vibrant carnival atmosphere of Canongate and the High Street. “You heard tell of Maggie, haven’t ye? The old haybag survived the rope. Certain, she did.”

“True, it is,” Kierney admitted.

They were speaking of old “Half-Hang-It Maggie,” who’d been given the short drop back in 1728 in the Grassmarket. The old girl was cut down and coffined, placed in a cart, and drawn away to a country cemetery. Some nine miles outside Edinburgh, she came back to life and went on to live a very productive life, having several children in the process.

They waded through the streets, passing crowded stalls selling fish and oysters, silk and dyed ostrich feathers, perfume and flowers. They stepped around the fish offal dumped to the slimy cobbles, cod heads and smashed herrings.

A young boy pushing a bakery barrow smiled up at them with a dirty face and missing teeth. He bowed to them and lifted the cover, his steaming goods on display: barley cakes and bannocks, iced gingerbreads and pastries drizzled with treacle, bridies, and loaves of hot wheat bread.

“Would ye gents be hungry, governor?” he asked, ever the charming little salesman.

“Oi, I would be,” Kierney said, buying some frosted pastries. “Can’t bear a hanging on an empty stomach, I can’t.”

From the High Street, Clow and Kierney were swept along by the mob into the Grassmarket, a winding open field that sat below the high crags of Edinburgh Castle. The Grassmarket was used as the city’s weekly market when it wasn’t busy with sheep and cattle fairs. But it was also the traditional spot of execution. Above was Castle Rock with its assorted crown buildings and the circular battery rising high into the sky, all of them seeming to lean out as if they would fall to earth. Opposite were the high, grimy medieval houses of Old Town, which rose up six and seven stories, their stacked chimneys seeming to scrape the clouds themselves. From ground floor to attic, the poor lived in tiers in those great and crumbling structures and today, every shutter was flung open, people crowding to watch the execution of Leaky Baker. Every tree, every rooftop was crowded with gawkers and onlookers.

By eight a.m., a raw stink of fish, manure, and discharge from the slaughteryards began to blow in, commingling with the ever-present stench of the surrounding slums themselves—filth and sewage and crowded humanity. A light rain began to fall and the sky was overcast, the color of gunpowder. But none of it deterred those that had come by the hundreds to watch Leaky Baker marry the rope-maker’s daughter. At the east end of the market was the traditional gibbet stone, which was fashioned from solid sandstone. It had a quadrangular hole in the middle that was used as a gallow’s socket. But today, it was ignored, for already the scaffold had been erected at the huge black hanging tree in the center.

“Lookee there, Sammy Clow, it be the gallows tree of Grassmarket,” Kierney said. “Enough to make yer blood run cold. Me mother used to say to us that it had stood long before there was a city here. That it was the last remnant of a black and leathery forest that covered the country in days of yore when no people walked here.”

“Yer mother was right,” Clow said. “Gives me the fucking shivers, it does.”

Nobody knew exactly what sort of tree it was, only that it was black and spidery and grotesque, rising up like a clutching hand. There was something evil and barren about it. Four men fingertip to fingertip could not encircle its trunk with their arms. Its bole was twisted and corded, the bark seamed and plated, the limbs long and stout and curiously jagged. Even in the greenest summers, it bore no leaf or sprout. Dead it was and dead it had been for longer than any could remember, as if maybe it wasn’t a tree at all but the mummified exoskeleton of some gigantic insect.