Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

“She’s dead. The eyes just became un-gummed and flapped open.”

Clow reached in there and put his hands on her, a not unattractive woman with graying hair and a full mouth, and as soon as he did, those eyes blinked and she sat right up. Kierney let out a cry and Clow fell over, a look of terror on his face. The woman was shaking and gasping, trying to draw a breath.

“Buried alive,” Kierney said.

“Gah… gah… gah,” the woman choked. “Guh… grave… grave robbers… help! Grave robbers!”

She began to scream a high and shrill cry, and Clow immediately tackled her, knocked her back into the box, and covered her with his own body. She writhed and jumped, but he held her fast. He clamped a hand over her mouth. His face was beaded with sweat.

“Listen to me, ye silly cow,” he breathed. “We saved yer life, we did. And we don’t want to hurt ye, so quiet with ye. Just lay quiet. We’ll gather up our things and be off. When we’re gone, ye can jump around all ye want, but let us get away… ye hear?”

The woman, though her eyes were stark with terror, calmed, seemed to understand that she owed them something.

Clow released her. “There’s a love.”

But immediately she sat up and began to shriek, and Clow put her down again, this time placing his hand over her mouth and squeezing her nostrils shut with thumb and forefinger, Burking her. She fought and squirmed, but Clow was too strong for her and soon enough she stopped moving at all.

“To the angels with ye, me love,” he said. “That’s it… nice… and… quiet… lovely …”

Kierney swallowed. “But Sammy, that’s—”

“Murder, do ye say?” He laughed, pulling his hand away from the woman, who was surely now a corpse. “Now how can that be, Mickey? She was already dead, and ye can’t kill a corpse. She was pronounced dead, weren’t she? Put in the grave dead, weren’t she? And buried, like? No, old friend, dead this hag was.”

He picked her body up in his arms and brought it out to the cart. Quickly, then, they screwed the lid back on the casket and covered it up carefully. When the slab was slid back in place, no one could say it had ever been touched. They loaded their tarps and tools over the top of the corpse and were on their way.

They made it through the gates unseen, a heavy mist blowing in from the canal. All around them, in those high and dark houses, Edinburgh slept. They pushed the cart over the bridge and to the cobbled lanes beyond. It was a good pull to Surgeon’s Hall.

They stuck to alleys and back streets, places where two men pushing a dog cart in the wee hours would go relatively unnoticed with the traffic of tradesmen doing the same. The fog was heavy and concealing, stinking of river bottoms and dead fish, black mud.

“What we did, Sammy,” Kierney said, a mile from Greyfriars Churchyard, “it was the right thing?”

“Aye, so it was. I gave that there corpse a chance to breathe and she preferred the silence of the years. What more could be done, old friend? I’ll not walk the scaffold nor have me best mate walking it for the likes of that silly cunt.”

Kierney was relieved by what he said.

Onward they went, through the mist and shadows and down evil-smelling closes, the wagon’s wheels ringing out over the cobbles. Dogs barked in the distance and the river misted, the buildings and towers of the city veiled in a morbid darkness. The woman’s feet kept sticking out of the tarp, but after a time, feeling a curious and fated sense of momentum, they did not bother covering them.

It was nearly dawn by the time they reached Surgeon’s Square.

At the Seven Keys, Mickey Kierney woke up in the damp stagnancy of his room. His head was pounding and his stomach roiling. He stumbled out of bed, overturned a candle that had burned down to a glob of wax on the nightstand, and promptly fell flat on his face, his pants tangled around his ankles.

“Bloody fuck,” he said, dragging himself along the cold floor like a slug.

He’d fallen asleep drunk, as was his nightly ritual, and, apparently, in the process of stepping out of his britches. Gripping the wall, he got to his feet with some effort and hopped himself to the chamber pot, then pissed. His urine smelled hot and briny, steam rising from it.

Wrinkling his nose and hooking up his pants, he pushed open the window and dumped the pot into the street three stories below. Of late, the city fathers had given notice that chamber pots and piss buckets were to be dumped into the public drain, not onto the cobbles below. But hardly anyone paid attention.

That done with, he collapsed back on the bed, trying to remember where he’d done his drinking the night before, but as with most days, he couldn’t remember. He looked around his cramped little room, thinking it didn’t smell much better than the overflowing midden below. The windows were clouded and filthy with fingermarks and settled grease. The floors were thick with dust and scattered rubbish. The bed smelled, the sheets gray and worn. The air stank of vomit and whiskey.

Enough. He needed some fresh air.

He grabbed his coat and hat and went out into the corridor, stepping over the snoring form of some sailor collapsed before his door. The walls were crumbling, the ceiling bowed, everything stinking like excrement. Down the stairs he went. They creaked and groaned as if they would collapse. On the third-floor landing were the fly-specked remains of pig entrails, blood and grease smeared about. And all the way down the steps, he was seeing bits and pieces: a snout, an ear, a hoof.

By Christ, what had happened?

At the bottom, dressed in dirty chemise, an old woman with one flabby breast on display stopped him. “Oi, ye silly bastard, have ye seen me pig?”

There was straw stuck to her feet, and from her doorway, Kierney could smell rancid pig shit.

“He’s up the stairs, I think,” he said.

The old lady started up. “Piggy? Piggy? Where the fook are ye?”

Downstairs, the Widow Clow had already worked through half a bottle of gin, and this by noon. When she saw Mickey Kierney come down, nearly falling as he tried to pull on his muddy Hessian boots, she speared him with her remaining eye.

“Ye fat little gob,” she said, wiping drool from her greasy face with a coal-smudged hand. “Where’s me Sammy?”

Kierney grinned. “That be yer son, love?”

“Quit with yer sass, ye ripe shit… where is that silly worm?”

Kierney entered the parlor, bowed to a couple sailors making their way out the front door, and dropped into a chair across from her. He drummed his fingers on the scarred tabletop. “What was the question, fine lady?”

“Where’s me son, ye bastard?”

“Why, he’s in the loo a-saying his prayers, I should think.”

Using a sharp deboning knife, the widow cut herself a wedge of chew from a block of rough-cut tobacco and worked it into her gums. “He is, is he? Well, ye can tell that rare bit of puss he can bloody well stay there with his own kind.”

“Yer in a rare mood, Widow Clow,” Kierney said.

“Shut yer thieving, lying mouth.”

“Certainly I will, lady. Thank you.”

Kierney made to help himself to her chew and that knife came slashing out, nearly taking off his thumb. “Oi, ye don’t be helping yerself to what’s mine, ye wee little sore. Sammy let ye have a room, but it were up to me, I’d throw yer foul ass into the street. Yer no good, Mickey Kierney, and ye never have been.”

Kierney smiled. “Aye, ’tis all true. I’ve tried to live up to your Christian ways, lady, but I lack your purity and virtue—”

The knife slashed out again, this time for his throat. The widow swore and shook with anger, wanting nothing better than to slit Kierney right open and dance a happy jig over his corpse.