Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

When he reached the pauper’s cemetery, he paused.

It was here the dead of all denominations were buried side by side. It was also here that the city fathers planted their charity cases. Their graves were lined up one next to the other like books on a shelf, simple stone markers, dates of death worn by the fingers of wind and rain. Weeds and blighted grasses sprawled unchecked.

Clow stood for some time under that black, starless sky, knowing he was alone and, yet, certain somehow that he was not. He was trying to get a feel for the place and what he was sensing, he did not like.

Maybe it was the air itself. It was impossibly heavy, leaden, palpable with a brooding sense of expectancy. It was swollen with moisture and edged by frost, yes, but it was more than that.

Nearby, now that he lit his lantern, Clow could see that a series of stones had been knocked flat, cast aside like dominoes as if something huge and nameless had pushed its way through there. He didn’t doubt it. Something had passed and in passing had slimed the stones with some black ichor, pressed aside the markers at weird angles, rent the very earth in jagged ruts from which a pestiferous blackness wormed and pooled. All around him the shadows seemed uneasy, warped, and shivering.

Beneath the shadow of the chapel, Clow began to dig, knowing instinctively by the look of the grave that he was in the right place. The soil was loose and his spade cleaved into it, tearing through the veil of earth that was the placental membrane of the charnel offspring below. The wind died out and there was an odd odor of spices and salts coming up from the ground. Moonlight washed over him as if the door to a lighted room had been swung open.

He reached the coffin, brushing aside a fat, coiling worm that inched over the surface. After some doing, he cracked open the lid and dragged the body up and out. No shroud this time. Just the corpse of a middle-aged man who had died of natural causes. His face was ashen and puckered, the lips drawn away from the narrow yellow teeth in a ghoulish grin. One eyelid was closed, the other half open, that dead eye staring and staring.

Clow was not superstitious, not even here, and even the grinning corpse and sinister aura of the place could not make him so. Maybe in the back of his mind there was fear of what haunted this place, but in the front there was only hunger and a need to get some coin in his pockets.

The ground was moving.

That’s what Clow noticed first.

It was a subtle motion as of respiration, as if something was breathing beneath him. It began to grow into a rumbling, shaking motion until the earth was heaving and moving like a ship in a storm. It spilled him on his ass. He nearly fell into the grave, and that’s when he saw that the hole he had opened had no bottom, that some barrow beneath had collapsed and he was staring straight down into some bottomless labyrinth.

Just like the last time he and Kierney had been there. The Corpse King was still active, and down there was its lair.

Clow didn’t hesitate.

He grabbed the corpse and almost got away, but a great heaving from below put him down again.

The ground was trembling madly, a roaring and thundering ringing out from far below, and there arose such a mephitic and noisome stench that he nearly vomited. It was the stink of a hundred burst caskets, a hundred wormy corpses, a gaseous reek of nitrous rot. Then, from the distance, he saw the rows of markers begin to… fall. Yes, a swath seven or eight feet in width was being cut through the headstones, they were scattering like dice. It was as if some invisible hand was pushing them aside and its path was coming straight at Clow.

But it was no hand, for it was coming from beneath the graveyard.

Some long and winding tunnel underneath was collapsing, sinking into itself, and the stones were sinking with it. Clow could see the earth rising and falling back again as if something huge was pushing its way toward him.

And it was.

As it hit the grave itself and sent Clow rolling, it surged up with a roiling, tenebrous motion.

And he saw it.

Saw it towering ten feet above him… a blasphemy.

The Corpse King.

It was like some huge and livid worm. Chitinous, segmented, more like an undulating spinal column than anything else. Some charnel god made of bones and sticks and graveyard mud, latticed with worms, crawling with centipedes and bloated black beetles, shrouded in ragged coffin silk. Its underbelly was made of skulls… dozens and dozens of them welded together. Yes, it was all crisscrossed bones and rungs of pitted rib threaded and sewn up with catgut, writhing hairs, and fanning ropes of cobweb that spread out thick and woolen like some hideous network of dead tissue.

Clow saw and was seen.

He pissed himself, something greasy crawling up the back of his throat. Though the Corpse King was vermiform in shape, there was a ladder of bone knotted with convoluted muscle and wiry ligament and atop it, a head. Yes, a grotesque exaggeration of a human skull, but the size of a barrel and made of spongy, rubbery flesh. It grinned down at Clow with interlocking teeth that were rapiers and mooring spikes.

He could not run.

He could not hide.

There was simply nothing he could do as his sanity bubbled in his brain and ran out his ears in a watery spill. He drooled and giggled, but there was little else. He clutched the disinterred corpse to him for comfort and watched the Corpse King slither closer, knowing that most of the creature was still under the ground. Grinning with bladelike teeth, looking down with lurid red eyes, a set of spidery limbs opened to either side of its wriggling body like fans. They were the width of broomsticks, long, jointed, and snared together by webs. They made a clicking sound as they wiggled and worked, anxious for solid ground to skitter on.

Clow realized it was like the sort of thing some anatomy student would throw together as a joke. Part skeleton and part insect and part worm. A gaseous, vaporous odor wafted from it. And it was all bad enough, this rattling, clattering, webby profusion of nightmare… but what it did next was worse.

It spoke.

With winds sucked from dusty catacombs and ossuaries, discordant screams and ghastly reverberations, it spoke and its breath was a hot, gritty blast from a crematorium: “Hand that over then… it belongs to me,” it said with a snake-like hissing. “There’s a love…”

Withered arms reached out to him, fingers that were skeletal and sharp, horned and netted with casket moss. They plucked the body from his grip. The cadaver singed and crisped where those fingers touched it, plumes of acrid smoke wafting off.

“We’ll have business together, Samuel Clow,” the Corpse King said, exhaling a storm of meat-flies, its breath like embalming fluid. “And soon… see if we don’t…”

Then with a nod of its skullish head, it slid back beneath the cemetery, the corpse clutched in its jaws, leaving nothing but a few graveworms writhing on the muddy ground.

Clow stood after a time, then carefully, cautiously, he ran and ran and ran. He did not fall, he did not waver. He just ran, accompanied by wet, chattering laughter echoing from subterranean burrows.

But he did escape.

He did not know how long it took him to reach the sullen, gaslit neighborhood of the Seven Keys. Sometimes he called out for Kierney before remembering he was dead, and other times he screamed when an undulant shadow crept in an alley or a slithering noise erupted from a sewer.

In the High Street, feverish and half mad, he scooped water from a public well and then vomited when it tasted of spoiled meat. Darkness was everywhere this night and he swam in it, bathed in it. The market stalls were closed and the shops shuttered. Drunken sailors tossed bottles at him and tawdry women lifted their tattered skirts to him, laughing and laughing. Sometimes he ran and sometimes he crawled on all fours like a beast. The cobbles were slimy with animal and human waste.