Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

Kierney muttered something.

The sound was getting louder, the tunnel vibrating so wildly now they could barely stay on their feet. Earth was dropping all around them. A skull dislodged itself from above and conked Kierney on the head. But it did not faze him. Nothing could touch either of them, they were too transfixed by that malignant other barreling through catacombs of rot and bones to get at them. Everything was trembling and canting, like an earth tremor was rising and rising from far below.

Kierney grabbed Clow by the arm and, together, they ran.

It took them not even five minutes to make it back to the dangling rope that Clow had tied off above, but it seemed an eternity with the ground shaking and that roaring, screeching noise behind them as the thing got closer and closer.

“Up the rope, Sammy!” Kierney said.

But as terrified as Clow was, he would not hear of it. “Ye first and right now, ye silly git!”

Kierney took one last look at his old friend and jumped on the rope, moving up it quickly and into the grave. Clow set the lantern at his feet, that roaring having become deafening now. Oh, yes, it was certainly coming and something in him died at the idea of facing it. It pushed a hot wave of putrefaction before it like warm, spoiled meat. And he heard other things… a clicking and a slithering, a dry rustling and a moist undulation. Whatever the Corpse King was, it was many things joined in a lurid danse macabre.

“Sammy! Up the rope!” Kierney called from above. “Do ye hear me? Up the fucking rope, ye ripe bastard!”

Clow heard him, all right.

But he could not move.

He brought the smoothbore musket up, his fingers oily on it. In the distance, in the flickering light of the lantern, he could make out a huge, rising swell rolling in his direction. Something that chattered a thousand teeth like roofing nails and clattered a million yellowed bones…

He saw two brilliant red eyes.

He fired the musket and the report was deafening, overwhelming. The muzzle flash saved him, though, for it blinded him to what came slinking and coiling out of the tunnel, something that would have driven him stark, screaming mad.

“Sammy!”

Clow was on the rope, sliding right up it, afraid that he would lose his grip and fall into the easy grasp of that noxious, undulating nightmare. But he did make it up, and once in the grave itself, Kierney’s strong hands yanked him up into the air and the world itself.

And then they were running, finding Old Clem and hooking that wagon up quicker than they thought was possible.

All around them, the cemetery was quaking and rolling, stones falling and crypts swaying, tree limbs falling everywhere. They raced out of the boneyard, a row of graves collapsing as the thing rocketed through the earth trying to catch them.

But once again, they made it.

“Never, ever again,” Kierney panted ten minutes later, “will we go into that cursed place.”

And to that, Clow could only silently agree.

But it was a lie and Clow well knew it.

Maybe Kierney could not see that or feel it down into his bones, but Clow did. Because, sooner or later, they would need to make a snatch, and if what they needed wasn’t available elsewhere, then they would follow the trail of money back to the North Grounds.

They wouldn’t have been the first.

For maybe Johnny Sherily with so many years sprawled lazily behind him and so much wisdom bottled and corked on the crowded shelves of his brain could turn his back on greed, but he was a rarity. There were few in the business that did not despise the handling of the dead, but they did it again and again for the money, for the pounds and pence and the easy, high life such things provided. Sometimes the work was dirty and despicable and downright sickening, but the money brought them back again and again. Just as it brought diggers back to the North Grounds even when they knew it was the lair of the corpse-eater.

The next afternoon, whiling away these thoughts, Clow walked with Kierney through the narrow wynds and closes of Old Town. The streets were noisy and bustling with carriages and livestock, horses and barking dogs, barrows and stray pigs. Children dodged about barefoot, trying to pick the pockets of merchants or simply chasing hoops about. Soldiers in red tunics chatted with prostitutes. Drunken women lounged in doorways, bawling dirty children at their feet. Traders were selling bread and pork and fish, turnips and potatoes. The cobbles were gray with horseshit, bits of straw, and standing pools of water. A couple girls selling flowers were splashed with mud by a passing hansom, and Clow and Kierney laughed. For straightaway they were no longer little angels but foul-mouthed creatures insinuating that the driver’s mother had lain with barnyard stock to produce something like him.

“It were some night we had ourselves, weren’t it, Mickey?” Clow said.

“Oi, I would call it a horrible night.” He shook his head. “Never will ye drag me to the North Grounds again.”

They walked in silence until they reached the brick archway that led to the close where the Seven Keys was to be found. You could not see the sky overhead, so much washing was strung between the high buildings.

Clow sighed. “What do you suppose it is, Mickey? A beasty? A boggle? A devil from hell?”

Kierney spit tobacco juice at a couple children panhandling. “Aye, all that and neither. I was thinking on it, since the bastard has stolen away me sleep again, and I think that this Corpse King is all that which a graveyard could be. Do ye follow me on this? He is graves and worms, corpses and rot, slime and shrouds and rats and mourning and grief… all of that stirred up in a big greasy black pot, simmered and steamed. And when the lid comes off that foul mess, well, then you’ve got our Corpse King. Something not dead but not alive. A hunger and an evil and a misting black death.”

Clow liked that.

He’d been thinking along those same lines. For if you left a dead dog to silently rot in the gutter, it drew flies and worms and crawly things, did it not? And couldn’t that be applied to the graveyards of men? That sooner or later, with all that rancid beef lying about, something would be drawn? Something would be generated? Something would be born in those dark, stinking depths, something with teeth and a mortuary appetite?

The idea of this had been growing in his mind for a long time, that places of death were also places of fungous, seething life. Maybe it took a corpse-grabber or a death-fisher to see it, to understand the verminous organic vitality that existed down in the tombs and hollows and catacombs. For it was there… the rank moisture and gassy heat and bubbling putrefaction. That while aboveground mourners walked with stiff hide masks for faces and black holes for eyes… and as the grave robbers and resurrection men followed in wakes of human ash and grave-filth with shovels in their hands… down below, there was a great putrefying womb steaming with corpse-drainage and carrion and floral decay and it was only a matter of time before that womb expelled some unspeakable creeping embryo born of dripping tombs and rotting coffins.

And now it had happened.

Or perhaps the Corpse King had been birthed centuries before, slinking through Roman death house or Celtic bone pile or Gaelic excarnation chamber where the flesh was allowed to rot from the dead so that the skeleton could be worshipped. Perhaps it had existed that long or longer or maybe it was just the graven, sepulchral progeny of such things.

Who could say?

Regardless, in some arcane and mystical way, Clow had been waiting for such a thing to make an appearance. And now that it had, he felt that his fate was somehow tied to its own.