Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

Gray cleared his throat, studying first the wrist bones, then the skull of the girl. “This girl… seven, no, eight years of age… excellent. She died of meningitis, yes.”

Clow chuckled. “Ye always know, don’t ye, Doctor?”

Gray gave him a withering look. “It’s my business to know. You’ll not pass any murder victims onto me, Clow. I’m not Knox. I don’t plan to be persecuted.”

“Of course not,” Kierney said.

Gray gave him the look now. “Yes…”

The cellar was made of gray, chilled concrete blocks that dripped water. A series of tubs was set out into which cadavers were dunked into preservative, left until needed. The air was close and stank of formaldehyde and alcohol and sweet decay. The cadaver of a middle-aged man was spread over a wooden table, his yellow flesh waxen and his eyes glazed over. He was slit open from crotch to throat, the flaps of skin pinned down so the viscera was on display, intestine and stomach and liver. Cold and meat-smelling. The top of his skull had been expertly removed, a bloody saw lying nearby. There was a tray of instruments arranged at the corpse’s feet. His brain was bobbing in a glass jar of serum.

“A bit of private research,” Gray said.

He poured himself a glass of claret, swirled its contents in the light of the gas lamps. He tasted the purple liquid, nodded, and dropped a few coins into Clow’s hand.

“Thank ye, guv,” Clow said.

“Before you leave, gentlemen,” Gray said, “tell me of John Sherily. He has not been by in some time… is he ill?”

Clow swallowed. “He’s gotten a bit superstitious, Doctor. Afeared of things what go bump in the night.”

“Sad, very sad,” Gray said.

“It is at that,” Kierney put in. “And him like a dear father to me. It saddens me poor tired heart, it does.”

Gray and Sherily went back together many years. It looked as though Gray was remembering each of them. “Mr. Sherily is a wise man, you know. You may think him a superstitious fool, but he is hardly that. Is it the North Grounds again?”

Clow nodded. “Johnny claims there’s… oh, it’s all bosh, not the sort of thing an educated gent would want to hear.”

Gray lifted an eyebrow. “Amuse me, then.”

“Well, sir, it’s that Johnny believes there’s something in the North Grounds what eats corpses and the like.”

“And you don’t believe that?”

Clow laughed nervously. “Not me. Rats, I say, nothing but the rats. Them graveyard rats can be quite fearsome, ye know.”

“Yes, I know.” Gray swallowed more claret. “But these stories do not concern you? Nor the missing resurrectionists and those poor souls that have been driven mad?”

Kierney laughed. “Not in the least! We laugh at spooks and boggles, we do!”

Gray looked at him like he thought he was a fool beneath contempt. “Then you will have no problem gathering certain materials I may need in the North Grounds?”

Clow assured him that they would not, would be only too happy to fill any orders Gray needed for his work and that of his students.

“Excellent,” Gray said, chuckling at some secret joke. “As they say, gentlemen, God protects fools. And with that, I bid you good night.”

Clow and Kierney left, glad to be free of the morbid Dr. Gray and the embalming stink of his workroom. They nearly ran up the steps and out into the rain, each wondering if Gray had been pitying them, warning them, or merely laughing at them.

If the lives of grave robbers loomed large and grim to the street rats and residents of Edinburgh and Glasgow—the sort of thing that fueled macabre bogey stories by hearthside and wild tales of evil men opening graves and plundering tombs by moonlight—they also inspired fear. For the crowded narrow byways of West Port and the shadowy, foul-smelling cul-de-sacs off the Trongate were thought by young and old to be teeming with gangs of body-snatchers, desperate and disturbed men who waited in alleys and dark doorways with sacks and chloroform pads and empty trunks. After the murder spree of Burke and Hare, it was not just the dead that had to worry, but the living. For there was a lot less work involved in snatching a fresh body than in prying open a grave.

Some of these fears were justified, others mere fantasy.

The winds off the Trongate in Glasgow were considered to be composed of a miasmic vapor produced by chloroform and gases emitted by decomposing bodies the body-snatchers had tucked down into those seething, polluted waters. One whiff of them was enough to make you swoon and two or three would put you out completely… and then, from the darks and damps and desolate places, the body-snatchers themselves would rise like rats seeking carrion.

And in West Port, wicked tales had existed long before Burke and Hare and their compatriots arrived on the scene. For centuries, the area was considered a place of malignance and iniquity. A place of terrifying legendry and stark belief, centuried tradition that had as yet not been shrugged off. The narrow winding closes and crooked stairways and rotting medieval houses were thought to be the haunts of witches and devils. People vanished in those high houses and cobbled, gaslit lanes and they had, it was said, since man had first began to hew the city from the dark primeval forests.

So there were always stories to be told if you wanted to listen.

And the grave robbers fit seamlessly into that patchwork of folktale and sinister tale-telling. They themselves inspired countless nightmares and why not? This was the era of the Edinburgh monsters, William Burke and William Hare, and their London colleague, Ben Crouch. To the massed uneducated poor of the early nineteenth century, these were bogeyman and skulking devils, cautionary tales used to keep children in line and the young from straying into the more degenerate byways of the city. These men inspired armies of resurrectionists, a great number of them medical students eager to obtain the raw materials needed in the anatomy theaters. There were markets for teeth and bones, even hair and fat.

No corpse was safe.

Mourners followed their deceased loved ones to cemeteries, for very often the bodies were snatched before burial. Family crypts were broken into and undertakers bribed. Men, women, children, it did not matter; they were all fair game for the surgeon’s knife.

People were afraid to go out by night, and if someone arrived home an hour or two late, everyone was certain they had been Burked and stolen away to the dissection slab.

But through it all, some, like the Churchyard Watch Association, remained vigilant, building high watch houses and patrolling graveyards. It was at great risk to themselves that the resurrectionists operated. For if they were captured, there were not only fines and imprisonment but often terrible abuse at the hands of the watch or mourning family members. Body-snatchers were hanged and beaten, whipped and stabbed, burned and even buried alive on a few occasions. But, then, their activities were at bitter odds with Scottish burial tradition, which promised each man and woman the life hereafter. Death customs had run deep and unchanging for countless centuries. Mirrors were covered at the time of death, clocks stopped and not restarted until after the funeral. Belief in spirits and ghosts was widespread. The art of sin-eating was openly practiced. During the wake, candles were placed beside the corpse, then a saucer of unmixed salt and earth was laid upon its breast… the earth being symbolic of the body’s corruptibility and salt of the immortal soul.

Even the body-snatchers themselves had developed an interesting body of lore, not that this was surprising, considering the beef they handled and the places they worked.