DARK SCREAMS

VOLUME SIX

Edited by Brian James Freeman and Richard Chizmar

The Old Dude’s Ticker

Stephen King

In the two years after I was married (1971–1972), I sold nearly a dozen stories to various men’s magazines. Most were purchased by Nye Willden, the fiction editor at Cavalier. Those stories were important supplements to the meager income I was earning in my two day jobs, one as a high school English teacher and the other as an employee of The New Franklin Laundry, where I washed motel sheets. Those were not good times for short horror fiction (there have really been no good times for genre fiction in America since the pulps died), but I sold an almost uninterrupted run of mine—no mean feat for an unknown, unagented scribbler from Maine, and at least I had the sense to be grateful.

Two of them, however, did not sell. Both were pastiches. The first was a modern-day revision of Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Ring” (my version was called “The Spear,” I think). That one is lost. The second was the one that follows, a crazed revisionist telling of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I thought the idea was a natural: crazed Vietnam vet kills elderly benefactor as a result of post-traumatic stress syndrome. I’m not sure what Nye’s problem with it might have been; I loved it, but he shot it back at me with a terse “not for us” note. I gave it a final sad look, then put it in a desk drawer and went on to something else. It stayed in said drawer until rescued by Marsha DeFilippo, who found it in a pile of old manuscripts consigned to a collection of my stuff in the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine.

I was tempted to tinker with it—the seventies slang is pretty out-of-date—but resisted the impulse, deciding to let it be what it was then: partly satire and partly affectionate homage. This is its first publication, and no better place than Necon, which has been the best horror convention since its inception, folksy, laid-back, and an all-around good time. If you have half as much fun reading it as I had writing it, we’ll both be well off, I think. I hope some of Poe’s feverish intensity comes through here… and I hope the master isn’t rolling in his grave too much.

—Steve King

Yeah, spooked, I’m pretty fuckin’ spooked. I been that way ever since I came back from Nam. You dig it? But I’m no section eight. What happened over there, it didn’t screw up my head. I came back from Nam with my head on straight for the first time in my life. Dig it. My ears are like radar. I’ve always had good hearing, but since Nam… I hear everything. I hear the angels in heaven. I hear the devils in the deepest pits of hell. So how can you say I’m some kind of fuckin’ psycho case? Listen, I’ll tell you the whole story. Think I’m crazy? Just listen to how cooled out I am.

I can’t tell you how I got the idea, but once it was there, I couldn’t shoot it down. I thought about it day and night. There was really nothing to pin it on. I had no case against the old dude. I dug him. He never short-dicked me or ranked me out. Yeah, he had bucks, but I’m not into that. Not since Nam. I think it might have been his… yeah, his eye. Jesus, like a vulture’s eye. Pale blue, with a cataract in it. And it bulged. You dig what I’m saying? When he looked at me, my blood ran cold. That’s how bad it freaked me. So little by little, I made up my mind to waste him and get rid of the eye forever.

Okay, now dig this. You think I’m nuts, okay? And crazy people don’t know anything. Run around with drool slobbering out of their mouths, stabbing wetbacks like that guy Corona, stuff like that. But you should have dug me. You should have seen how cool I was. I was always one step ahead, man. I had that old dude jacked up nine miles. I was super-kind to him the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the knob of his door and opened it. Quiet? You better believe it! And when it was just wide enough for me to stick my head in, I put in this penlite with the glass all taped up except for one little place in the middle. You follow? Then I poked my head in. You would have cracked up to see how careful I was, poking my head in. I moved it real slow, so I wouldn’t roust the old dude. It took me an hour, I guess, to get my head in far enough so I could see him lying there on his rack. So tell me… you think any section eight would have been able to carry that off? Huh? But dig this! When my head was in the room, I turned on the penlite. It put out one single ray, and I put it four-oh on that vulture eye. I did that seven nights in a row, man, seven nights! Can you dig that action? I did it every night at midnight, but the eye was always closed and I couldn’t get it on. Because it was the eye. And every morning I went right into his bedroom and clapped him on the back and asked him how he slept. All that good bullshit. So I guess you see he would have to have been some heavy dude to guess that every night I was checkin’ him out while he was asleep. So dig it.

The eighth night I was even more cooled out. The minute hand on my watch was trucking along faster than mine was. And I felt… sharp.

You know? Ready. Like in Nam, when it was our turn for night patrol. I was like a cat. I felt ace-high. There I was, opening the door, little by little, and he’s lying there, probably dreaming he’s balling his granddaughter. I mean, he didn’t even know! Funny? Shit, sometimes I laugh until I scream, just thinking of it. I started to laugh at the idea. Maybe he heard me, because he started to move around. Probably think I split out of there, right? No way. His room was black as a cat’s asshole—he always drew the shutters because he was afraid of junkies—and I knew he couldn’t see through the door, so I kept pushing it open, a little at a time.

I had my head in and I was getting ready to turn on the old penlite when it knocked against the side of the door. The old guy sits up in bed, yelling, “Who’s there?”

I stayed still and kept my mouth shut. You dig it? For a whole hour I didn’t move. But I didn’t hear him lie down, either. He was sitting up in bed, scared shitless, just listening. The way I used to get sometimes in Nam. A lot of guys used to get that way, thinking those guys in the black pajamas were coming, creeping through the jungle, through the dark.

I heard him groan, just a little one, but I knew how scared he was.

It wasn’t the way you groan when you just hurt yourself, or the way old folks sometimes groan at funerals. Uh-uh. It was the sound you make when your head is totally fucked up and you’re starting to blow your circuits. I knew that sound. In Nam, at night, I used to get that way sometimes. Nothing wrong with that, a lot of guys did. Nothing section eight about it. It would come up from your guts like acid, getting worse in your throat, scaring you so bad that you had to put your hand in your mouth and chew it like a chicken drumstick to keep from screaming. Yeah, I knew the sound. I knew how that old dude was feeling and I felt sorry for him, but I was laughing, too, inside. I knew he’d been awake since the first sound. He’d been getting more and more scared. He was trying to, you know, blow them down, but he couldn’t do it. He was saying to himself, It was the wind around the eaves. Or maybe a mouse. Or a cricket. Yeah, it was a cricket. You dig? He was trying to cool himself out with all kinds of shit. But no good. Because Death was in the room with him. Me! Death was sniffing right up his old man’s nightdress. Me! He was feeling that. He didn’t see me or hear me, but he dug me.

After I marked time for a long while without hearing him flop back down, I decided to give him the light. So I turned it on and that single ray shot out from the masking tape and landed square on that fucking eye.

It was wide open and I got more and more pissed off, just looking at it. I saw every detail of it. This dull dusty blue with that gross-out white stuff over it so it looked like the bulging yolk of a poached egg. It froze me out, man, I kid you not. But, see, I couldn’t see anything else of his face or body. Because I held the light straight on that goddamned eye.

And didn’t I tell you that what you call crazy is just how together I am? Didn’t I tell you how sharp my hearing has been since Nam? And what came to my ears was this low, quick noise. You know what that sound was like? Have you ever seen a squad of MPs on a parade ground? They all wear white gloves, and they all carry these little short sticks on their belts. And if one of them takes his stick out and starts tapping it into his palm, it makes a sound like that. I remember that from Nam, and from Fort Benning, where I trained, and from that hospital where they put me after I came home. Sure, they had MPs there. White gloves. Short sticks. Slapping those short sticks into those white palms… white, like the cataract on the old dude’s eye. I knew what that sound was, there in the dark. It wasn’t any GI head-bopper. It was the old dude’s ticker. It made me even madder, the way beating a drum will make a GI feel ballsier.

But I still kept cool. I hardly breathed. I held the flashlight still. I tried to see how steady I could hold that one thread of light on the eye. His heart was beating even faster. I could hear it, are you digging me? Sure I could. Quicker and quicker, louder and louder, it got so it sounded like a whole regiment of MPs beating their sticks into their palms. The old dude must have been scared green! It got louder, you dig what I’m saying? Louder every second! You follow me? I told you I’m spooked, and I am. And in the middle of the night in the creepy quiet of that big old house, that sound really got to me. But I still held off. It got louder… louder! I thought his ticker would bust wide open. And then I thought, Hey, dig it, the neighbors are going to hear it. They got to. I got to shut him the fuck up! I let out a yell and threw the flashlight at him and went across the room like O. J. Simpson. He screamed once, but that was all. I dragged him onto the floor and yanked the bed over on top of him. Dig what I’m saying. I started to grin at how good it was going. I could still hear his heart, but that didn’t get on my case, not at all. No one was going to hear it, not with that bed on top of him. Finally it quit. I pushed the bed off and looked at the body. Yeah, he was dead. Stone dead. I put my hand on his ticker and held it there for five, ten minutes. Nothing. His eye wasn’t going to bother me anymore.

If you still think I’m a section eight, dig on how cool I was getting rid of his body. The night was getting on, and I worked fast, but I kept it quiet. Quiet was the password. You got it? Quiet. I cut him up. I cut off his head and arms and legs.

I pried up three of the planks on the bedroom floor and stuffed the pieces of him down inside. I put the boards back so carefully that no eye in the world—not even his—could have spotted anything wrong. There was nothing to wash out, not a single bloodstain. I was too cool for that. I cut him up in the shower, you dig it? Ha! You dig that scene? Ha! Ha! Far fucking out, am I right?

By then it was four in the morning, still dark as midnight. The doorbell rang. I went down to open it, and I was feeling good. Why not? It was the fuzz. Three of them. They were cool. One of the neighbors had heard a yell.

Sounded like someone had been cut or something. The guy called the cops. They had no search warrant, but would I mind if they took a look around?

I grinned. I had no worries, right? I told them to come on in. The scream was from me, I said. Bad dream. Had a lot of them. War veteran, and blah-blah-blah. You’re digging it, I see you are. I said the old dude had gone up to his country house for a while. I took them all over the house. Told them to look anyplace they wanted. No sweat. After a little while I took them into his bedroom. I opened his desk, showed them that the cash he kept in the lockbox was still there. Also his watch, and the cat’s-eye ruby pinkie ring he wore sometimes. Nothing touched, nothing even out of place. I dragged in some chairs and told them to sit down and rest their feet. Me, I was really flying. I was ace-high. Dig this. I put my own chair right over the spot where the old dude had gone to pieces, you might say. Ha! Ha!

The piggies were satisfied. They were getting my good vibes, I think. They sat and we shot the shit, where was I stationed in Nam, oh, is that so, we were there, how many years were you in, man, what a bitch, you know the scene. I was everything a good Boy Scout is supposed to be, brave, reverent, cheerful. But before too long I started to crash out and wished they’d split. My head was starting to ache, my ears ringing. The way I was when they shipped me back stateside, back to that hospital. Combat fatigue, they said. Fuck that bullshit! And they just sat there, the cops, I mean, shooting the shit, Dong Ha, Saigon, Da Nang, all that creepy crap. The ringing in my ears got sharper. Even sharper. I talked more and more to get rid of it, but it was getting more and more together, more and more like… like it wasn’t in my ears at all.

I could feel myself getting pale. But I talked even faster, and louder, too. Yet the sound got louder. It was this low, quick sound… like a bunch of MPs slapping their nightsticks into their white-gloved palms. I was having trouble catching my breath, but the cops didn’t seem to notice. I talked more quickly, but the sound got worse. A whole battalion of MPs now… whap! whap! whap! Jesus! I started arguing about all kinds of small shit with them, which hill was where, who commanded what, I don’t know. The noise still got worse. Why didn’t they just get the fuck out? I started pacing the floor, stamping up and down, as if something one of the cops said had pissed me off—but the noise got worse. Oh, Christ! What could I do? I raved. I swore at them. I told them their mothers were whores, that their uncles were also their fathers. I started whirling the chair I was sitting on, grinding it on the boards, but I could still hear it in spite of all the noise I was making. A meaty, pulsing sound, like nightsticks whacking into palms covered with white duck cotton gloves. It got louder—louder—louder! And the cops just kept on smiling, shooting the shit. You think maybe they didn’t hear it? God! No, no way! They heard it!—they suspected!—they knew!—they were putting me on!—I thought that then and I think it now. Nothing could be worse than the way they were smiling at me! I couldn’t take it! If I didn’t scream I’d die!—and I could still hear it, MPs, like the ones stationed at the hospital, the hospital where they took me after I scragged the lieutenant, the place I crashed out of—MPs—millions of them—short sticks—whacking—whacking—louder—louder—white cotton gloves—that dull quick meaty sound—louder—

“Stop it!” I screamed at them. “Stop it! I admit it!—I did it!—rip up the boards!—here, here!—it’s his heart! It’s the beating of his hideous heart!”

—

Statement taken August 14, 1976. Investigation has confirmed that the suspect, going under the name of Richard Drogan, is in fact Robert S. Deisenhoff, who escaped from the Quigly (Ohio) Veterans Hospital on April 9, 1971.

The Rich Are Different

Lisa Morton

I can hear Lennox outside the door. It’s almost dawn; I’m not sure how long he’s been out there in the hallway. I awoke when I heard something that sounded like a frog’s croak calling my name.

I wonder what he looks like. The door is locked from the outside, but he may not be human enough to turn it. Part of me wants him to do it, to come in… but another part is afraid to see what he’s become.

Even though we’re in love.

—

Of course he looked fine when we first met. It was the day of his thirty-fifth birthday party.

A week earlier, my agent, Lauren, had received an email from a Wilmont family secretary. They wanted to invite me to a party, it said. Lennox Wilmont in particular was a fan of my book, The Rich Are Different, it said. The party would be at their estate outside Atlanta. If my agent could provide my address, they’d send me a formal invitation.

Lauren called me and told me she thought it was real. I was surprised, to put it mildly; I’d have bet money that the Wilmonts would have hated the novel. Of course they knew it was loosely based on them (everyone knew that; after all, I’d said it in People), and it was not exactly a loving tribute. Critics had called the book “a vicious, razor-sharp indictment of America’s super-wealthy”; Amazon reader reviews just said, “I couldn’t put it down!!!!”

“Do you think I should go?” I asked Lauren.

“What, are you kidding me? Damn straight I think you should go. You’ve talked forever about wanting to get past those estate gates. Now they’re handing it to you, and you’re asking if you should go?”

She was right. I’d have to book a plane—

“They’ll handle all your travel arrangements, by the way,” Lauren added.

I told her to give them my address. The official invite arrived by courier the next day. There was a card in a foil-lined envelope, first-class round-trip plane tickets, and a little handwritten note about how they’d love to see me. The note was signed “Madelyn.”

As in, Madelyn Wilmont, one of the wealthiest women on the planet, and the basis for the matriarch in The Rich Are Different. I’d made her older in my book—in real life she was only forty, not fifty-something. I’d imagined what it would be like to meet her, get to know her… be her.

Five years ago I wouldn’t have hesitated. But five years ago I was still married to Derek. Then I’d found Derek at the office Christmas party kissing his secretary nowhere near any mistletoe, and divorce had followed. I was just thankful we’d had no children to permanently fuck up and I was still young enough to conceivably find someone else.

Except… I hadn’t. I’d tried a few dates, but my confidence was shot. I felt middle-aged (at thirty-four), overweight, dowdy, despite the best clothes book royalties could buy. I knew rationally that I wasn’t, but… well, seeing your husband with his tongue halfway down the throat of a woman you never considered especially attractive apparently had some unexpected side effects.

So I’d buried myself in my work instead. It had paid off: I’d given up the celebrity pieces for EW and gone into novels. The first one, Paper Cuts, had been well reviewed and just barely successful enough that I was given a contract for a second book. That one had been The Rich Are Different, and it had scored big-time. The advance had provided a generous down payment on a house in Chicago’s suburbs. The movie option had allowed me to pay off the house. Lauren had joked with me about being rich enough to be different.

Of course, that’d been a year back. Since then my writing skills seemed to have migrated with my physical self-image. I spent too many days scrolling idly through social media instead of working on Book Number Three. My editor was concerned. Lauren was concerned. My ex-husband was… well, getting blow jobs from his secretary.

I spent too many hours telling myself I wasn’t a failure. I might have gotten lucky once, but I was incomplete, purposeless. Friends (all married) told me I needed a man. I scoffed, we laughed… and then I went back to the house, where I lived alone, and tried to tell myself it wasn’t like that at all.

Maybe a visit to the Wilmonts’ would reinvigorate me. What the hell. I wrote back to the email address on the card and told them I’d be delighted to come. Someone named Jasmine replied instantly and said she’d add my name to the guest list, plus a limo would be waiting for me at the airport. I’d stay overnight at the Wilmont estate and fly out again the next morning. No presents, please. The date was two weeks away.

I spent those fourteen days fussing and fretting—could I lose weight in two weeks? Should I change my hair color? What would I wear? Were they expecting me to be hipper and younger?

I shopped. I saw my hairstylist (but we stuck with my usual auburn). I didn’t really lose any weight.

Of course, I read up more on the Wilmonts, but I knew most of it. They stuck pretty much to themselves; no reality TV show for them, no trashy affairs with rock stars or DUI busts. They were rarely photographed in public, but when they were, they were beautiful. Given how much money they had, how could they have been anything else? Lennox had the sort of boyish, broad face and floppy dark hair that could have earned him willing women even if he hadn’t been rich. Madelyn was sleek and serious, like a Maserati in human form.

Their wealth had always been something of a mystery. Way back in the 1840s, a Wilmont ancestor had migrated here from the Old World to grow tobacco and cotton. He’d already been well off, but he’d made even more money in America, mainly because he’d also invested in the slave trade, and their assets had continued to accrue. Madelyn was married to a man named Alan Ashton; rumors circulated that he spent most of his time in a wing of the family mansion, drunk and enjoying the company of Prince Valium. They had one son, Grant, who should be sixteen by now, but he hadn’t been photographed in public since infancy. Lennox had never married. Their father, Harris the Third, still ran the family corporation, but he’d spent most of his life living in New York. Their mother had died young of cancer. There were no other siblings.

The big day arrived. I took so long making last-minute decisions, changing outfits over and over, that I nearly missed my flight. I tried to relax in my spacious first-class seat, but I was tense and distracted.

I got off the plane with my bulging carry-on (ridiculous, I know, for an overnight stay) and when the escalators spilled me out into the baggage claim, I saw a man holding a sign with my name printed on it.

I stopped for a second, there at the bottom of the escalators, staring, as other passengers bumped into me. The man holding the sign was at least seven feet tall, with a bulky, stooped frame. A cap was pulled low over his eyes; flat, sand-hued hair spilled out from under it. He wore oversized sunglasses, leaving me to imagine what color his eyes must be, and an overcoat that was too heavy for the southern warmth. For a second I considered turning around, or taking a cab out to the Wilmont estate… but then he saw me and dropped the sign.

Well, I thought, he’s probably great security.

I stepped forward, slowly. He reached one massive paw (his large pink hand had stubby fingers) out and, wordlessly, took my bag. He turned and headed out of the baggage claim. With no other real choice left, I followed.

His limo was parked curbside. He opened the rear door for me, and I was glad to be separated from him by the sheet of glass between the driver and the rear passenger area.

We headed away from the airport. At least he was a cautious driver. I tried not to look at the back of his massive head, square and furry beneath the cap.

It took about forty minutes to reach the Wilmont estate. We left the freeway and got on a two-lane blacktop that wound through scenic hills and lush, wooded valleys before coming to a private drive that began with a guard booth and gate. He waved to whoever was in the booth; as we passed it, I tried to peer through the glass of the enclosure to see who was inside, but it was tinted, opaque.

It was late afternoon as we rolled onto the Wilmonts’ private grounds. The sun was at the horizon, its long rays now silhouetting trees and outbuildings with golden auras. The driver slowed, moving at no more than ten miles per hour. I was wondering why when I saw something running through the trees maybe one hundred feet to the right. It was difficult to see clearly, as it darted in and out of shadow and sight, but I saw enough to know its movements weren’t right—it ran on two legs but loped as if it was off-balance, flailing too-long arms wildly. I couldn’t make out color or facial features, nor even guess at what it could have been. It was so improbable that I wondered if it was some sort of puppet or illusion.

I started to say something to the driver, knock on the glass between us and point, but then the strange runner vanished and the house came into view.

It was even more impressive in person than it looked in the photographs and videos I’d seen. It lolled among the trees like a gigantic animal at rest, the upper-floor windows bright with the last of the sun while lights glowed warmly from the lower rooms. The drive curved around before the double-door entrance, and we pulled to a stop there. The taciturn driver opened my door, took my bag and set it down at the top of the steps leading to the doors, then returned to the limo and drove off.

I heard music coming from somewhere nearby—live, jazzy—and smelled food cooking. I was just climbing the steps to ring when the door opened. Madelyn Wilmont smiled down at me.

I wasn’t prepared for how stunning she was in person. She looked far younger than forty, with the sort of perfect casual elegance that only wealth can provide. She extended a welcoming hand to me, and I took it, surprised at its heat. “Hello, Sara, it’s so lovely to meet you. I’m Madelyn.”

A few of the reviewers of The Rich Are Different had praised its “sharp-tongued voice,” while others had decried it as “needlessly verbose.” Neither quality surfaced now; when faced with Madelyn Wilmont’s effortless poise, I felt like a single leaf of wilted spinach, small and inadequate. I just grasped her hand and smiled.

She turned to indicate the entrance. “We’ve got a room ready for you—I thought you might like to relax a bit before joining the party. It doesn’t really start for another hour, anyway.”

I started to reach for my bag, but Madelyn flicked a slender wrist. “Oh, no, dear—I’ll have that brought up to you. The stairs to the second floor are quite a climb, even without a heavy bag.” She turned and strode into the house. I forgot about my bag, following.

I tried not to stop and gape at the things we passed—delicate vases and furnishings that were probably invaluable, shelves of leather-bound books behind glass doors—but it was the art that staggered me. It ran the gamut from modern to Pre-Raphaelite. I found myself literally frozen before one large canvas in the style of Italian late Baroque. It was a landscape—classical ruins atop a hillside beneath a gloomy sky—but it was the figures in the image that caught my attention. At first glance they’d merely looked like dancers, or revelers, but upon closer inspection they were revealed as not entirely human—a leering face was topped by subtle horns, a bent torso perched atop shaggy goat legs. It was haunting, something out of a dream.

“Ah, I see you’ve found our Magnasco.”

I saw Madelyn watching me, and I realized I’d been unaware I’d even stopped. “I’m sorry, who is it?”

“Alessandro Magnasco. He’s one of our favorites.”

Something about the way she said “our”—some implication of possession, perhaps—raised a few more unspoken questions. I forced myself to turn away from the painting, smiling. “I’m not familiar with Magnasco. This is fascinating, though.”

“Not many people know him.”

I looked at the painting again, my attention drawn to a figure loping across a clearing before a collection of cracked and tilted columns. Something about the figure… saturnine, long arms swinging, legs bent the wrong way—

“Shall we…?”

I jerked around, on the verge of a question, but broke off as Madelyn continued on up the stairs. We’d just reached the second-floor landing when a voice from below called up, “So, that’s Lennox’s package?”

A man stood at the bottom of the staircase, looking up at us; he was middle-aged, balding, dressed in polo shirt and khakis, holding a drink in one hand. He swirled the contents of the glass, the ice inside tinkling.

Madelyn stopped, turning slowly, her gaze icy. “Alan, meet Sara Peck. Sara, this is my husband, Alan.”

He saluted with the drink. I was just opening my mouth to greet him when he blurted out, “We’d introduce you to our charming so-called son, Grant, but the little freak’s out running loose somewhere—”

Madelyn cut him off, firmly but not loudly, a technique she’d probably honed from frequent use. “Alan! I’m sure there must still be a few bottles of gin out back that you haven’t drunk up yet.”

Alan smirked, started to amble off. “Of course. Good luck, Miss Peck. Oh, and by the way, dearest—this is vodka.”

He vanished through a doorway, and Madelyn’s shoulders sagged. “My apologies for that, Sara. My husband… well, he’s developed an unfortunate tendency to overmedicate…”

“No apologies necessary, Madelyn. I understand.” Which wasn’t entirely true—I didn’t understand how a father could call his son a “little freak” and make the crack about “running loose somewhere.”

Madelyn led me to a bedroom on the second floor that was roughly twice the size of my first apartment. “I thought you might enjoy the Gold Room,” she said, with just a slight twist of sarcasm.

The room was furnished in tasteful gold and white, and I didn’t have to ask if the finishes were real. I stepped to the spacious windows and looked out onto the rear of the Wilmont estate. Just below, dance floors had been set up around an Olympic-size pool; a band played in one corner, people milled, chefs cooked at stations tucked in among marble statues and trimmed hedges. “Thank you, I’m sure I will.” I turned to face her and saw that she waited in the doorway, apparently expecting my question. “I have to confess, though, that I’m not quite sure why I’m here.”

She smiled, laughed slightly, then said, “You’re Lennox’s birthday surprise. He’s been a fan ever since he read your book, and he’s been dying to meet you.”

“Oh.” A flutter circled my stomach. I was a “birthday surprise”? Was I expected, perhaps, to change into a bikini and pop out of a giant cake?

Madelyn must have seen something in my expression, because her own smile faded. “Sara, my brother and I are very close. And I’m sure you’ll find him quite charming.” She backed away, reaching for the door. “I’ll have your bag brought right up. I’m really so happy to have you here.”

She stepped out, closing the door behind her.

As I used the bathroom (a little in awe of the real gold fixtures), my anxiety ramped up. What was expected of me? Why did the bit about Madelyn and her brother being “very close” sound like a jealous wife’s warning? What if I didn’t fit the picture Lennox had of the author of The Rich Are Different?

As I stepped out of the bathroom, I was heading for my purse to get a Xanax when a knock came at my door. I steeled myself, expecting the limo driver, and pulled the door open.

Lennox Wilmont stood there, my bag grasped in one hand. When he saw me, his handsome face was split by a grin that made him look younger. “Oh my God, you really are Sara Peck!” He dropped the bag and stepped toward me, and for a second I expected him to fling his arms around me… but then he grasped one of my hands instead, the picture of youthful enthusiasm. “When Madelyn told me you were the guest in the Gold Room, I didn’t believe it. I am such a fan!”

Lennox was everything I’d read: seemingly genuine, warm, magnetic… and very hot. Literally—his hand felt almost like it was scorching mine. I realized I was blushing, but I forced myself not to turn away. Lennox saw it and laughed, but it was out of delight, not derision. He was so beautiful it was hard to look at him. “Happy birthday,” I finally said, and even that came out too soft.

He released my hand, and part of me was sorry. “Thanks, but to tell you the truth—I hate these things. Maddie always wants to throw them, but I never feel quite comfortable among all those people.”

“Really? That surprises me.”

Lennox arched his eyebrows and gave me a half-smile. “Well, Ms. Peck, I hope I can show you some other surprises, too.”

“Sara, please.”

He nodded. “Sara.”

We stood there for a moment, uncomfortable in that way that only two people who are very attracted to each other can be. Finally Lennox waved at my bag. “Would you like a few minutes to change, or…?”

“No, I’m fine, thanks. Should we go down to join your party?”

“Only if you want to. You know what I’d rather do?”

“What?”

“Show you the Beltane Room.”

Now, that was an interesting invitation. The Beltane Room was one of the most mysterious parts of the Wilmont estate. It appeared in side mentions in family histories, the name apparently being derived from a three-day-long party that was held there in 1920, starting on the evening of April 30—Walpurgisnacht, or Beltane in the old Celtic calendar. No one knew exactly what had happened at the party, or at least if they did they hadn’t talked; they also hadn’t mentioned what was in the room.

I said, “How did you know I was going to ask to see it?”

“I think we have a connection.” He took my hand again, and the strength of my response—tingles of desire—made me light-headed. “Come on.”

We exited the Gold Room and turned left heading out, away from the main staircase. “We’ll take the servants’ stairs so Maddie won’t see us,” he said.

He led me down the hall, through a doorway, down a narrow spiral staircase, and through a utility room. Opening another door there, he indicated more stairs leading down. “It’s in the basement.” He waved me ahead and glanced around to see if we’d been spotted.

I headed down the stairs and waited for him at the bottom. Around me was a utilitarian hallway, like something you might find beneath a hotel. He joined me, and I followed him to one end, where he used a key to unlock an unmarked door. He reached inside, flipped a light switch, and bowed. “The Beltane Room, m’lady.”

I stepped past him—and froze.

The room was large—unexpectedly so—and lit by two huge chandeliers overhead. It contained low divans, all upholstered in decadent velvets and brocades, and tables holding crystal decanters.

But the walls were the real attention-getter. They were covered with art—not framed paintings, but a mural painted right on the walls. Lennox pulled me to the left so I stood in front of a re-creation—or was it a continuation?—of the Magnasco painting I’d admired earlier. “Start here and follow it around.”

The work looked like a hurried version of the Italian classicist; it was less perfect, more rushed, but similar in theme, with gods and nymphs cavorting among ruins.

“You’ve heard of the Beltane party that took place here in 1920…? Well, what you probably haven’t heard is that one of the guests was a well-known artist who took three days to paint this. The other guests—who included famous actors, writers, and at least one newspaper mogul—drank bootleg liquor and smoked hashish and spent the three days here just watching him work. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

I moved to my right and saw that there was a definite progression to the painting: It grew darker, the figures more violent. Now they looked less like gods and more like monsters. “It looks like the Magnasco upstairs, but…”

“Yes. One of the guests was a medium—you know, they were all crazed for spiritualism back then—and she swore the artist was channeling Magnasco.”

“Who was the artist?”

“His name was Dennings. You wouldn’t have heard of him—he was a highly regarded forger, you see.”

I came to a corner, turned to the right—and stared in shock. Now the figures on the walls had the dark, shaggy fur coverings of mammals, but they walked upright and bore human faces. And they were… well, not to put too fine a point on it, they were vigorously fucking one another. A few yards farther to the right, two of them were entwined above the dead body of a naked woman, blood pooled on the ground around her severed legs. Feeling simultaneously nauseated and curious and excited, I moved around the next corner and saw piles of dismembered corpses, some with splayed legs as if they’d been violated.

“Jesus,” I muttered.

“It’s fascinating, though, isn’t it?” Lennox stood behind me, so close that I could feel his presence like a storm cloud. “They’re gods, you know. Old, very old, gods. Can you imagine watching this take shape beneath the artist’s brush, while around you a real-life orgy is happening? The rich smells of the smoke… and the sex…”

A shiver passed through me, my own excitement surprising me. Lennox must have seen it, because he purred soft approval.

Past the next corner, the art gave way to words:

Once, long ago, in a land on the far edge of the world, there lived a poor shepherd. The shepherd, his wife, and their two children barely existed on goat’s milk and a few rabbits the shepherd was able to snare…

I bent down to read more but paused when I felt Lennox just behind me, his body close to mine, his breath hot on my neck. I was suddenly afraid—not of him, not even of the terrible scenes on the wall or the childish story, but of myself, of what I might do if I suddenly turned, when he was there behind me…

“Lennox!” That was Madelyn’s voice. I hadn’t heard the door open, and I did turn, startled by her harsh tone. She stood just inside the Beltane Room, her posture rigid. “The party is upstairs.”

Lennox was facing her, away from me, and he was slightly hunched. When he spoke, his voice sounded too deep, too rough. “Why can’t you leave me alone?” A musky scent hit me, strong enough that I backed away and tried to breathe through my mouth.

Madelyn waved at Lennox angrily. “Lennox, stay here while I escort Sara out.” I hesitated—which of them did I prefer to displease? But Lennox kept his back to me, silent. “Lennox, I’m sorry,” I said, as I walked past him.

Madelyn led me upstairs—not back to the Gold Room, but out the front door, where the limo waited for me, my bag already inside. “I’m so very sorry, Sara—this was entirely my fault.” She handed me an envelope. Inside was a folded sheet of paper—and a check. I saw the words NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT at the top of the sheet. I didn’t bother to see how many zeroes were on the check. I passed the whole thing back to her. “Don’t worry—it’s not necessary to buy me off. I like Lennox too much to hurt him.”

I climbed into the limo, pulled the door closed, and looked down into my lap. I didn’t want Madelyn to see that I was crying.

—

The next day Lennox called me at home. “I’m sorry for that, Sara,” he said. “I’d like to see you again.”

“Your sister made it clear that was a bad idea, I think.”

“My sister is not my keeper.”

We chatted awhile longer, about everyday things, almost like normal people—about birthdays and airport security and bad in-flight movies and weather. After an hour, Lennox asked me what I was doing later that night.

“Nothing,” I answered, my heart hammering, feeling for all the world like a teenager on the phone with a cute guy.

Eight hours later, I was staring at a blank computer screen when there was a knock at my front door. Curious, I moved to the peephole, looked through…

Lennox was there, holding flowers.

I panicked. I was wearing dingy sweats; it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d actually fly up. “Just a minute,” I called through the door as I turned, unsure what to do first.

“You’ve got three minutes, then I bust this door down.”

I fled to the bedroom, plundered the closet, realized I didn’t have time to put on anything more serious than my best jeans and a plain pastel T-shirt with a V-neck that gave me the illusion of cleavage. I was checking myself in the mirror a final time when he knocked again, more insistent. “I swear, Ms. Peck, in ten seconds—”

I gave up on primping, ran to the door, took a deep breath, opened it.

For an instant we just stared at each other, smiling, not quite believing. Lennox broke the silence at last. “You know, I just lied to my sister and flew through a storm to be here—are you going to invite me in?”

“Of course. Please come in.”

I stepped back and gestured. He handed me the roses (yellow, my favorite—how did he know?) and came in, looking around. I was immediately self-conscious, seeing every frayed furniture corner and speck of dust, but he just nodded. “So this is how real people live.”

I was about to come back with some witty riposte when it occurred to me that Lennox probably really hadn’t been in many homes that weren’t mansions. Sitcoms were probably the closest he’d ever gotten to even upper-class suburbia.

I inhaled the heady scent of the bouquet. “These are lovely. Let me get them into some water.”

I walked to the kitchen, set the flowers down to reach up to a high cabinet for a vase, had just pulled it out and was turning to fill it with water when I saw Lennox in the kitchen doorway, gripping the sides as if holding himself up. “I’m not very good with social skills, so I’m just going to say it: I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.” His eyes locked onto mine, and I couldn’t suppress a small tremor. I had to look away just to keep any ounce of composure.

“Lennox, I…”

He stepped closer. “If you want me to leave, I will. If you want to sit and talk for a while, I’ll try. But what I’d really like to do right now is kiss you.”

I couldn’t speak. I leaned back against the sink, breathless, as he pressed himself against me. His lips found mine, his hands were on my waist, my fingers twined around his neck, in his hair, pulling him down to me.

“Sara,” he whispered, moving his tongue to circle an ear, then trace a delirious path down my jaw.

I said nothing because I was lost. I was lost in arousal, lost in my desire, my need, for Lennox Wilmont. I nearly sobbed because it annihilated me. I’d never felt this before—not even with my husband, when we’d been first married and still genuinely in love. When Lennox moved his hands down to my hips and pulled me to him until I could feel how hard he was, I groaned as my own lust broke my inner censors.

He moved his mouth down to my breast, seeking it through the thin fabric of my clothes, and I arched, wanting him to find it. He said my name again—

Something was wrong. His voice sounded strange, too coarse even though roughened by sex. Some part of me tucked safely away heard and sounded an alarm, but the other ninety-nine percent chose not to listen, not to stop—

The front door burst open. I gasped and pushed Lennox away so I could turn.

The driver who’d met me at the airport stood there, his massive frame barely squeezed in. He was staring at us, and even from across the living room I could hear his breathing.

“Lennox, what—” I turned to look at him—and froze, staring.

The skin on his face had changed color, going so pink it was almost fiery. His hair seemed longer, shaggy, his ears slightly pointed. But it was his eyes that really paralyzed me: They’d lost all color, including white, and were depthless black pools. He released me and started toward the driver. “Why can’t she just leave me alone?”

It took me a second to realize the “she” wasn’t referring to me, but probably to his sister, Madelyn. Lennox was making sounds now like something between a whipped puppy and a banshee wail, his frustration so overwhelming that he didn’t even react as the driver gripped him by one shoulder and steered him out of my house. The driver said only one word as he led Lennox to the car:

“Father.”

At least it sounded like “Father,” but that made no sense—Lennox’s father was dead, so the driver wouldn’t be taking him to see Daddy Dearest. A priest, perhaps?

Whoever it was, I hated them for taking Lennox from me. I watched the car drive away, then went to my bathroom, turned on the shower, and cried as I stood under the water, still dressed.

—

I got an email from Lennox an hour later. It didn’t say where he was—on a plane going home? Still in the car? In some other house owned by the Wilmonts?

Dearest Sara:

There’s a story I’d like you to hear. You read part of it in the Beltane Room, but of course my sister wasn’t about to allow you to read all of it. Well, in honor of Madelyn, here’s the story for you:

Once, long ago, in a land on the far edge of the world, there lived a poor shepherd. The shepherd, his wife, and their two children barely existed on goat’s milk and a few rabbits the shepherd was able to snare. They weren’t happy—they were hungry and cold.

Things got worse after the shepherd’s wife died, leaving him alone with two small children. His wife had made the goat’s milk into cheese; without her, they had only milk to drink. They were alone in the wild countryside, with no one to help them.

One day, as hunger gnawed at their insides, the shepherd cursed the gods for his ill fate… and lo, the very deity he’d blasphemed appeared before him. The shepherd began to shake with fear—for the god was fearsome in appearance—but the god smiled upon him. “You have called me, shepherd, and I’ve come to relieve your suffering… if you are willing to pay the price.”

The shepherd fell to his knees, lowering his eyes. “Anything! Just give us food.”

“I will give you more than food: You and yours shall always have good fortune. You will never again starve, or want for anything material. Your children will be as gods.”

“Yes,” the shepherd said, sobbing in gratitude, “yes, yes!”

“But the price is this: Your children will appear human until they feel lust, and then their desire will make them into my children, divine in appearance and strength. Should they seek to satiate themselves with a mortal, they will create a victim, not a lover. They will have only each other to fulfill their needs and continue your line.”

The shepherd quaked in horror at this terrible offer, but then he saw his children’s gaunt faces and bloated bellies. “Is there no other way?”

“There’s painful, empty death.”

The shepherd accepted the offer.

Instantly he found himself before the door of a fine house; stepping inside, he discovered tables piled high with delicious food. His children appeared and they all began to eat, marveling at this sudden wealth.

For some years they were happy, and the shepherd began to believe that he’d earned this good fortune with his own hard work. But then his children came of age, and he saw the signs. When his son tore a local maiden apart, he hid the act and told his children the horrid truth. They saw what they must do, and so they coupled only with each other, in the form of gods, and their divine progeny continued down through the centuries, walking in secret among mortals.

After the story, Lennox had added, “I hope you’ll remember only this about me: that I loved you.”

I printed out the email and read it over again, hoping that somehow the hard copy would render the words into something comprehensible, sensible, but there was no sense to be found. After my fourth reading, I set the email down and sped through airline websites. I made phone calls and found a flight leaving for Atlanta in three hours. I didn’t bother to pack; this wouldn’t be a long visit, if the Wilmonts even agreed to see me at all.

But I had no choice: I had to demand answers. And see Lennox again.

—

I arrived at the Wilmont estate shortly before dawn. The sky hadn’t started to lighten yet as I pulled the rental car up to the front gate. The guard, whom I still couldn’t see behind the window of the guard shack, spoke into a phone before rolling back the gate. I pulled forward.

It was late, and I was operating on no sleep and a cup of bad coffee I’d picked up at a convenience store after leaving the airport, so it took me an extra, startled second to react when the figure ran in front of the car.

I slammed on the brakes and was thrown forward against the seatbelt. I knew instinctively that the thing outlined in my headlights was the same one I’d glimpsed on my last trip here, running awkwardly through the woods: a humanoid figure with furry legs, bent back at the knees like a quadruped’s, with hooves instead of feet. The torso was downy, the arms long, the head capped by a tawny mane and curling horns. It stared at me with wide, golden eyes.

It raised an arm and brought it down on the hood, hard enough to dent the metal. Opening its jaws wide, it screamed, a sound that stopped my heart.

It started to come around the front of the car toward the driver’s side, gliding on those impossible legs, a long tongue darting out of its mouth. I glimpsed something moving in the groin, and my paralysis snapped. I slammed my foot down on the accelerator. The car shot forward, tires squealing.

I didn’t look into the mirror to see if it was following. As I screeched to a stop before the house, the front door opened and someone stood there, outlined by light. I grappled with the seatbelt and then leapt from the car, shouting, “Lennox!”

“No, it’s Madelyn. Come in, Sara.”

Now I did look back, but nothing had followed. Cold flooded me; I was shaking. When Madelyn put an arm around me, I fell into the sanctuary of it. “Something chased me, something not human—”

“Grant,” Madelyn said.

I stopped, gaping at her. “Grant? But that’s your son’s name…”

“Yes. My son—with Lennox.”

“With… no. Lennox?”

“Come in and sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.”

I let Madelyn lead me into the great house, into a room of rich padded chairs and large hearths. Madelyn seated me, brought a glass. I sniffed it—bourbon—and downed it in one gulp. My chill began to ease. Madelyn sat opposite, sipping her own glass more carefully.

“I know about Lennox’s email to you,” Madelyn said.

At the mention of Lennox, my heart thrummed. “Can I see him?”

“Not yet. We need to talk first.” Madelyn set her glass down, piercing me with her gaze. “Sara, I have to ask: Are you in love with Lennox?”

I started to answer, then caught myself, thinking. Yes, I wanted Lennox—dear God, how I wanted him—my entire body thrilled at the thought of him… but was that love? And was this intense attraction natural, or had I been manipulated, unnaturally influenced? “I’m not sure.”

Madelyn considered before going on. “I’m prepared to offer you a life with Lennox, but not the life you’re probably imagining. I would approve of your marriage to Lennox, you would live as his wife, with all the privilege of a Wilmont… but you would never be able to consummate the relationship.”

At first I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard, but then I remembered my last visit here. “Like Alan?”

“Yes.”

I thought of Alan, the bitterly drunken husband, useful only for appearance’s sake. “No. I won’t live like that.”

“You have to understand that if you were to… be with Lennox, you wouldn’t survive.”

“Are you saying that story—the one in the email, the one in the Beltane Room—is true?”

“It’s the family history.”

An unwelcome image of Lennox and Madelyn entwined, naked and altered, saturnine, popped into my head. “How many children do you have?”

“Six. Five of them have to be hidden away. You met Grant outside. Only one looks human; she will be my successor.” Madelyn gestured at a silver-framed photo of a blond-haired little girl smiling into the camera—the most beautiful child I’d ever seen. “We’re still trying for a boy.”

My stomach filled with bile. I tried to stand, but my knees threatened to give way and my vision swam. “But Lennox loves me…”

“Sara, let me get a room ready for you. You’ve suffered a shock, you’re in no state to travel again right now.”

Numbed by revelation and liquor, I didn’t react as Madelyn took me up the stairs to the Gold Room. I was dimly aware when she stepped out and locked the door from the outside as she left. I fell onto the bed, where I let myself go, weeping with little strength, repeating his name over and over.

“Lennox… Lennox…”

Eventually I fell into an unhappy state that might have been sleep.

—

I awoke when I heard my name, soft and muffled. The sky was only starting to lighten, so I knew I hadn’t slept long. I lay there, fuzzy-headed but sobering up quickly, listening. It came again:

“Sara…”

Even though it didn’t sound human, I knew it was Lennox. He knew I was here. I wondered if he’d caught my scent.

What will I do if he opens the door? Does Madelyn know he’s out there, prowling, already transformed by his desire for me? Had she planned this—giving me to Lennox as an easy way to dispose of me?

The door bangs and shudders; he’s thrown himself against it. A new sound now: claws scrabbling at wood.

He’s turning the lock.

I don’t scream, at least yet. I don’t call Madelyn, or prepare to run. I’m sweating, but it’s not from fear.

I know he’ll be beautiful.

I sit on the bed… and wait.

The Manicure

Nell Quinn-Gibney

I. Left Thumb

When I push open the door, a bell emits a piercing brass chuckle, but there’s not a single person in sight. I take a step back and double check—sure enough, the sign in the window blinks OPEN in fluorescent lettering. I hesitate for a moment, wondering if I should come back another time, but I drove all the way over here, and honestly, I’d just like to get it over with. The bell sounds for a second time as I walk inside and plant myself in front of the reception desk. Some sort of jazzy piano is playing through the speakers in the ceiling, but it sounds as if the piano needs to be tuned. I wince, wondering who chose the music.

The room is heavy with the sweet smell of floral air freshener, with the metallic tang of nail polish and disinfectant right underneath. I try to breathe shallowly through my mouth to avoid these landmark scents. The floor looks like it’s made out of the same uniform brown linoleum found in elementary schools and hospitals all across the country, and the walls are an ambiguous green. The light and shadows play on the questionable shade, brightening it into a nearly yellow color around the glowing wall lights and fading it out to a patchy grayish-green in the corners. The wall to my left is covered with shelves of polish: at least a hundred different reds taking up three shelves to themselves, and hundreds more bottles spanning the color wheel above and below. A row of lattice-metal waiting chairs with a few magazines from the early 2000s lines the window that opens onto the dark street. A line of thick brown dentist chair/foot bath combos looms against the back wall, and the rest of the room behind the reception area is dedicated to my own personal nightmare, the manicure desks.

“Hey there, honey, sorry to keep you waiting!”

A chipper young woman emerges from the back room, beaming at me. Her accent is some sort of unidentifiable New England blend. She is wearing bright red lipstick that throws her yellowed teeth into stark contrast.

“Hi. I don’t have an appointment.”

“Well, you can probably see business is a little slow right now. We’ll be able to take you immediately. What can we do for you this evening?”

“I’ve got a gift certificate for just the basic manicure package,” I answer.

“Have you ever had a manicure before?” she asks, leading me to the desk closest to the back of the room. I sit down and look warily over the array of aromatic creams and metallic apparatus in between us.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, we’ll start with your cuticles and then soak your hands for a few minutes. After that, we shape the nails.” All she does to my cuticles is rub something vanilla-scented around my nail beds, and the water she places my hands in is warm enough to not be entirely uncomfortable, although there’s something in it that makes it feel somehow slimy. When she dries my hands and pulls a pair of formidable-looking nail scissors from a small pouch, however, I flinch.

She notices but doesn’t remark, just takes my left hand in her own. The blades of the scissors spread, and without intending to, I’m speaking.

“I thought they didn’t actually cut your fingernails at manicures,” I say, cracking my knuckles as an excuse to take my hand back.

“Not always, but it’s the easiest way to shape them down when they’re this long. I can file them all the way down instead, if you’d rather.”

I’m a grown adult. I can handle this. “No, it’s fine. Go ahead and cut them.”

Clip.

II. Left Index

I started cutting my own nails when I was nine years old. Until then, it was my least favorite bedtime ritual. I would sit down on my mother’s bed, tissue beneath my spread hand, and she would take the pair of curved scissors off of her side table. It was always evening, after a bath, and I would be in my pajamas. The bedside lamp would be on, casting blue shadows in the creases of my knuckles. I would settle into the bed, trying to sit as still as possible: I was never a squirmer, not when it came to my nails.

My mother would take my hand and fold all of my fingers down except one, starting with my pinkie and then moving one by one to my thumb. I would feel the cold, hard metal against the pad of my finger, wince as the pressure built and the solid end of my nail flexed upward, and then feel the clench and release in my stomach as the sharp click sounded and my nail end broke off, joining the pile of off-white crescent moons on the tissue.

I hated cutting my own nails marginally less than I hated having them cut by someone else. It was less painful in the same way that trying to tickle yourself doesn’t quite work. I no longer worried about delicate layers of skin getting caught between those two thin blades. I even found tricks to make it easier—running my hands under warm water would make my thick thumbnail more pliable, and using larger toenail clippers would make the cuts faster. Still, when I cut them myself, it had to be my own momentum to close the clippers, my own strength that stretched and snapped the stiff keratin.

“You getting your nails done for any reason in particular?” the woman asks. It’s been twelve years since anyone else has cut my nails. One down, nine to go. Only nine. Easy.

“No. Just thought… figured I should get it done.”

Clip.

III. Left Middle

My grandmother got me a nail kit for Christmas my last year of elementary school. Really, my uncle picked it out and wrapped it and wrote her name on it in his best approximation of her handwriting. That was the year that her Parkinson’s got really bad and her memory started to go along with it. The kit had three different nail polishes—pink, purple, and clear glitter—along with a pair of butterfly nail clippers and a sparkly purple file. “Thanks, Gram,” I said obediently, bending down to give her a hug. She touched my cheek. Her hand was as wrinkled as if she had just been in the shower and she smelled of toothpaste and urine. “Merry Christmas,” she replied, never turning to actually look at me.

My mother sat me down later that evening to show me how to use the file.

“I don’t want to, I don’t like it,” I whined.

“Don’t be ungrateful,” she said. “It’s easy. Here.” I will never forget the sandpaper rasp, the chalklike dust collecting on the edge of the file, no pain but pressure and the rough edge scraping across my fingerprint. I threw the entire kit away that night after my mother went to bed.

“Do you paint your nails very often?” the woman asks. “I paint mine all the time.”

I glance at her nails—they are short and unpainted and slightly discolored. I bite down against a grimace. She laughs. “Well, not right now.”

Clip.

IV. Left Ring

Computer lab was right before lunch, and the students were always rowdy and the teacher never cared. The cool boys, the ones who would buy their lunch every day and always had the extra dollar to get ice cream, too, the ones who would play DS on the bus and who could do at least twenty push-ups in the PE fitness tests, were grouped around one of the chunky computer screens, laughing about something.

“Let’s go see what they’re looking at,” my friend suggested, clearly bored with the Word Art she was making. I looked at her, horrified. We brought lunch in insulated lunch bags and my mom sent me a cup with a screw lid full of milk every day. We couldn’t do even five push-ups. We didn’t talk to them.

“They don’t wanna show us,” I whispered at her.

“Why not? It sounds like it’s funny.”

She didn’t understand about lunch boxes and PE class. I didn’t know how to tell her no, and before I could think of a way, she had stood up and was walking down the aisle. My hands went all cold, but I hopped up and followed after her.

“What’re you looking at?” she asked brightly. They kept giggling as they turned to face us, and I felt fire in my cheeks.

“Come see,” one of them said. “If it’s not too gross for you girls.”

My friend pushed her way through, and slowly I followed because the only thing worse than looking at the picture would be walking back to my seat.

They were watching us from behind, laughing and talking in low murmurs. I felt tears rushing to my eyes but blinked them back as I twisted my arms around my torso. On the computer screen was a picture of a woman with greasy white hair and a bony face—and sprouting off the ends of her fingers, nails that must have been three feet long. They were painted bright pink and were curved in more than a half-circle, forming crisscross cage bars in front of her body. You could see the yellow undersides to some of them as they curved around, and I wondered how she could eat, get dressed, type on a computer, hold a pencil, touch another person. I tried not to throw up.

“You know, you really shouldn’t let your nails get this long unless you have some sort of cream to put on them to keep them stronger. We sell that here. They must break a lot. Do they?” the woman asks.

“Um, sometimes, I guess.” I’m trying to focus on something else, eyes darting around the Ikea artwork, searching for anything to grab my attention. The smell in the air refuses to let me forget where I am.

Clip.

V. Left Pinkie

They do break off frequently, as a matter of fact. I never cut them enough, so they grow out too long and I don’t take care of them, so they snag on things and tear holes in every pair of tights that I own. Usually I have three or four long nails and one or two jagged, short ends that are weak, pliable, and constantly driving me crazy. I’m always running my fingers over them, equally bothered by the unsymmetrical, slanted nails and the tiny stubs. When one of my nails gets half torn off and I’m out somewhere without anything to cut with, I start to make always unfulfilled promises to myself that I will cut them more frequently. These half-strips of nails hanging off, and the tiny splits that spread down the middle of the nail but leave it attached at either end, push me to face the choice: the choice between leaving the nail attached to catch on everything and for me to constantly, nervously, incessantly bend and fold, or to tear it off… or at least to try. Often when I start to pull at the loose end, the split spreads down until I have to rip off the edge of my nail that attaches to my skin, leaving the pink, raw topside of my finger exposed to the world.

“So, do you have a boyfriend? You’re very pretty,” the woman remarks. If I didn’t feel so nauseated I might laugh at the “Who’s your boyfriend?” stereotype, but there is a knowing, ironic tinge to her voice, as if she’s intentionally slotting herself into the cliché and doing it with a smile. I wish I could know what she’s thinking.

“Not at the moment,” I answer.

Clip.

VI. Right Thumb

I was lying on my back on my best friend’s bed. We were sixteen years old and I was in a phase where I picked at my nails, and that’s what I was doing then, pulling at the cuticles around my middle finger as she told me about the boy she was dating and how she thought she might be in love with him. I knew that her boyfriend was a scumbag, but I was trying to sound sincere with my “yeah”s and “no way”s and “really, what did he say”s and I was afraid she could hear the artificial brightness in my voice. I listened just enough to his good-night texts and favorite bands to respond to her, while focusing on trying to figure out what was creating the pebble in my throat, growing larger with each passing moment.

“Hey, stop that!” I broke into her monologue and my own reverie as I reached out to swat at her hand—she’d wrapped the long cords that dangle to adjust the blinds around her finger, tightly enough that the top joint had swollen up. The meat of her fingertip was pressing over the edge of her fingernail, turning a mottled violet. It looked almost shiny in the low lighting, practically circular and ready to pop. It turned my stomach.

“No.” She laughed, yanking her hand away. “I like it. It feels kind of cool.”

I tussled with her for a moment, then lay back in defeat. She picked up from where she left off about their Olive Garden dinner and I watch her finger fade from purple to gray, as outside the window, the sunset turned the sky the same colors.

“It’s not usually this empty in the evenings in here. I guess it’s just your lucky day,” she says, smiling broadly. I think irrationally about punching her, knocking those off-colored teeth out.

“You could say that.”

Clip.

VII. Right Index

I was seven years old and my cousin was chasing me around the house. He was older than me and bigger and my mom had told me to tell her if he ever tried to play doctor with me or made me uncomfortable. He never had, but the tone in my mom’s voice made me queasy whenever I was around him and I would never let us end up alone together. He was laughing and moaning like in the zombie movie we had watched last night—against my parents’ better judgment—and I had to get away before he ate my brains or, more likely, sat on me. The kitchen floor was patterned with sunlight as I flew across the tiles, heading straight for the back door. If I made it outside, I could climb a tree and be safe, but he was gaining on me fast. I could feel the back of my shirt stretching out as I grabbed the handle and threw the door open ahead of me. I raced through it, spinning around backward to fling the door shut, and then—

I was screaming and blood was flowing freely onto the floor and soaking into the edge of my sleeve, turning the blue fabric into a rich magenta. I went to wrap my other hand around the finger and felt the entire nail shift underneath my palm, pain pulsing all the way through the bone of my arm. I stopped trying to hold it and screamed louder.

After I got home from the hospital, I had to soak the finger in Epsom salts every night for the next six months while I waited for the nail to grow back. I don’t know what it was actually for—to keep it from getting infected, probably. At the time, I thought the cloudy, milky water was some sort of magical potion to make the nail grow back faster. It couldn’t grow back fast enough to replace the series of Hello Kitty and Toy Story Band-Aids that covered the sensitive pink flesh that stung at the lightest touch. I spent far too long staring at it, fixated and horrified by the tiny nail creeping up my finger day by day and the strange alien appearance of skin not supposed to be seen.

“Do you know what color you want when we’re done here?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it. Blue? Maybe?” My voice sounds higher than normal and cracks on the last word.

“Red would look lovely with your hair.”

Clip.

VIII. Right Middle

For most of my life I was meticulous about keeping my nails clean and healthy—never biting them, washing with soap to get the dark rings out from underneath the tips. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, however, I started picking. I would sit in my room with my headphones on and try not to hear the sounds of my parents fighting through the vents and study my nail beds. The tiny white peaks of dead skin around my cuticles drove me crazy. First, I would slide another nail underneath to make one stand straight up. I would press the side of that finger against my teeth and close them with a click—an echo of those dreaded scissors of my childhood—to try to bite it off. Sometimes the skin would still be soft and I’d tear it away with a tiny, tiny swell of pain as living skin came with it. Sometimes it would be hardened and would snap off, but there would always be a stout piece still rooted into the flesh of my finger. Try to bite it again, but now it was damp and flexible and too short to get a good grip with my teeth. I’d start pulling with the bitten stubs of my thumb and index nails, pull until purple welts would appear around my nail beds and it hurt to wash my hands.

“You seem a little tense,” she observes. “But I promise I won’t cut you! Five years working here and I’ve never cut anyone.”

My breathing is erratic. My heartbeat is pulsing in my ears.

Clip.

IX. Right Ring

I have never been able to go ice-skating. The first time my parents took me was when I was six years old. My dad kneeled down in front of me to lace up my skates and warned me that if I fell down, I needed to move to the side and get back on my feet very quickly so that no one would skate over my fingers. I started crying and refused to go out on the ice. In the car all the way home, I kept imagining the schick of the blade, the cool spray of ice chips against my hand, the pink-gloved finger skittering away across the ice, leaving a thin red line behind like a caterpillar’s damp trail.

“Almost made it,” she tells me. “Only one more. You’re doing great.”

At some point I must have moved the hand she has finished under the table. It’s clenched in a fist, green veins pressed taut against the skin. I can feel my nails pressing marks into my palm. I want to cry.

Clip.

X. Right Pinkie

“See, just one more left. I don’t know why you were nervous.” She folds my other fingers down, just like my mother used to do. My head is spinning and spots flicker in front of my eyes. The small pink caterpillar is crawling away from me, a swollen purple head protruding from the end, sparkles haphazardly smeared along the back, a Hello Kitty Band-Aid wrapped around the middle… red trail smearing out behind it, red just like the puddle on the gray desk collecting underneath my rigid finger and the woman is buzzing—

“I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry, you must have jumped or my finger slipped or something, oh my God, I don’t know what happened, just wait here while I get the first-aid kit, do we need to call a doctor? There’s a lot of blood—”

My cousin reaches out to grab my shirt and rakes his nails down my spine, my grandmother touches my cheek and digs her claws in deep enough to hit my molars, the boys are watching my back but they’re doing more than watching, they’re sliding their nails across my shoulders as lightly as feathers and I can’t see them but I know they’re there, my best friend who I lovelovelovelovelove has wrapped the cord back around her finger and pulls tight, so tight that the top joint pops off with the sound of a can opener ripping the last shred of metal apart, my mother and father are tearing at each other’s tongues and throats with their fingers so they don’t have to listen anymore, I’m scratching at my own nails, scratching until I dig down deep enough and the nails spring off, chunks of meat still attached to the underside, spinning away through the air—

“Just sit still, oh my God, there’s no one else in, they didn’t tell us what to do in these situations, it doesn’t look too deep, but there’s a lot of blood, just keep breathing, all right? I have to—”

And then there’s quiet. Quiet in the store, I don’t know where she is but she’s gone, and quiet in my head. The scissors that she had cut me with are in my hands, although I don’t remember taking them. I reach out slowly and wrap my bloody finger in a pristine white towel on the desk next to me. I stand up and place my gift certificate and a five-dollar bill carefully to the side of the puddle of blood, then drop the scissors into the bowl of lukewarm water, watching the red feathers spiral through the liquid for a moment before I turn to leave. I find the switch on the top of the sign and slide it so that OPEN turns as dark as the pavement outside. The bell laughs again as I exit.

The Comforting Voice

Norman Prentiss

“She misses her grandfather.”

Josh could barely hear his wife over their daughter’s wailing. As usual, no discernible trigger prompted Lydia’s shrill cries. They’d searched for physical causes: a rash or some undetected illness that X-rays and reflex tests and specialists might uncover. The doctors insisted she was perfectly healthy.

A happy baby, most of the time.

But any time of day or night, at home or during their increasingly rare stroller walks in the neighborhood, she’d fall into a full-throated fit of screaming. In public, heads would turn, neighbors or strangers offering help or sympathy. Some of them clucked their tongues, wondering what kind of parents would allow their baby girl to suffer such agony.

As if there was anything to do. When Lydia got like this, nothing would calm her.

Not even bedtime exhaustion. Twelve pounds now, lungs each the size of a plum, yet she could last for a full hour. Then finally the tease of calm, her parents sliding quietly under covers, heads hitting the pillows, almost drifting off, a sudden gurgle, an infant intake of breath, and then the shrieking began anew.

The same pattern several nights in a row, and Josh could barely function. Without sufficient sleep he was irritable at work, and even with his wife. He feared he’d fall asleep behind the wheel of his car. One morning he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten to his office building. The wall decorations looked different, and the eyes in the owner’s portrait blinked a greeting at him. At his cubicle, entry boxes pulsed on his computer screen; their labels changed as he clicked the cursor into them.

Josh couldn’t take much more of this.

A loving father would do anything for his daughter.

He would do anything to make the noise stop.

—

They’d had one solution.

He put up with it, for a while.

—

“Do the voice,” Michael prompted from the next table.

The request offered Josh another odd spotlight of lunchtime popularity. In a workplace where management forced staff to compete for largely nonexistent bonuses, people typically kept to themselves. Lunch was a strict noon-to-twelve-thirty routine, their office too far from Route 21’s drive-thrus, so they brown-bagged in near silence or waited to zap a Lean Cuisine. One day last month, in the tedious line at the building’s only microwave, Josh made an offhand comment about his father-in-law. He stared at the instructions for his baked chicken with string beans and said, “Jesus, this is ridiculous. Pull back film over vegetables and rotate meat one quarter turn. What am I, a chef?”

Not much amusement from the captive audience, so Josh did the worst thing you can do after a joke: He explained it. “Cheryl’s dad. He’s, uh, staying with us awhile. The old guy had surgery to remove his vocal cords, so he speaks with one of those electronic voice boxes.” Josh set his entrée on the counter, then rubbed his right hand over his Adam’s apple. “Holds the amplifier here and pushes a button.”

Did he dare? Josh wasn’t necessarily a gifted mimic, but a few times in his life he’d stumbled into near-perfect vocal impressions: his high-school soccer coach with the faint lisp; an undergraduate history professor with a thick southern drawl. And his father-in-law—not as he’s known him all these years, but the way he sounds now, after the laryngectomy.

“Oh, God, it’s too cruel,” Josh had protested. “I really shouldn’t do it.” Yet such protest, even among barely civil colleagues, couldn’t help but prompt a few voicings of encouragement, “You brought it up” and “Well, now you have to.”

He was a musician begged into an off-duty performance. Oh, it won’t be as good without the orchestra; I apologize in advance; usually I like to warm up my voice, practice a few quick scales…

Josh pressed his hand to his throat, miming each syllabic push of the button, and he found the guttural monotone at the back of his throat as he reenacted his father-in-law’s complaint about microwave cooking.

Again no response, at first, but the comical irony of it grew—at the idea of an older man’s verbose phrasings pushed through an electronic device, at his struggle to convey resentment without variation in pitch or volume—and by the time Josh hit “rotate meat,” Patti in accounts, Patti who never laughed or even listened since other lives didn’t interest her, Patti had covered her mouth, too late, because she’d done an actual spit-take of her Diet Coke. His coworkers laughed at that and at Josh, too, as he finished out the mimicked phrases.

“Poor old guy,” Josh said. “Can’t help the way he sounds. But he makes the strangest comments, in that voice. I swear.” Josh crossed himself to affirm he spoke the truth but also to hint at solemnity. He walked a fine line. Even though most listeners identified with jokes about difficult in-laws, it might seem cruel to mock someone who was recovering from a serious illness.

“Cheryl’s father is staying with us a lot, while he’s getting better. Also, he’s really happy to spend time with his new grandkid.”

Hank, one spot ahead in the microwave line, asked the obvious question. “Your little girl. How does she react to…?”

“Yeah, I was worried about that myself,” Josh admitted. “Turns out, Lydia doesn’t mind it at all.”

An understatement, really, but he didn’t feel the need to share everything with his coworkers.

He lifted one corner of the plastic film over his frozen entrée, collected a napkin and fork from the countertop. Performance over, head down, just getting through lunch again and then back to work. On impulse, and without looking up, he deadpan monotoned the start to a lullaby.

Hush little baby, don’t say a word.

Pappy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

The lunchroom echoed with rare, uncontrollable laughter.

—

Truth was, Josh didn’t much like his father-in-law and had initially fought with Cheryl over the decision to allow his visits.

It should have been easy to talk her out of the idea. By Cheryl’s own account, he’d been an indifferent father at best. At worst, he had the personality of a mean drunk—without needing any alcohol or Hyde’s potion to prompt the meanness. He’d slipped into rages at his wife and daughters when they failed to meet his impossible, old-fashioned expectations, and sometimes young Cheryl had hidden from him until the latest arbitrary tantrum subsided. He never apologized afterward. “I speak what I feel. Not good to keep things bottled up.”

Some of his tirades insisted that his family was “bringing him down”—trapping him in a drab home and in a small-town job with no prospect of promotion. “I wish I could be rid of you,” he sometimes said, adding an unfortunate, colorful turn of phrase: “Weren’t for you worthless ladies, I’d be farting through silk.”

And yet, when Cheryl attracted boyfriends, he deemed none of them worthy. As her relationship with Josh grew serious, her father bristled at the idea. “Get her back here in an hour,” he’d say, if they were headed to a movie. “She has house chores to finish.” After a flawlessly prepared holiday meal, Mr. Hampton pulled Josh aside for a private discussion. It was like a moment from the fifties, a father-to-suitor exchange on the family porch. Mr. Hampton lit a cigar, puffed, then exhaled a slow series of smoke rings. “Cheryl gets bored easily,” he said. “She’s ready to break up with you.”

To Josh, the spiteful phrasings were well aimed. The words would never leave him. But what bothered him more was the man’s dismissive treatment of his own family, particularly (of course) Cheryl. He couldn’t go back in time and comfort the girl who’d hid beneath the bed while her father raged; he wasn’t the neighboring schoolmate who sometimes offered shelter to a frightened teenager. Instead, he could be there for her now, moving forward. He promised he’d stand up to her father, make him treat her properly. But no, Cheryl had begged, that will only make him worse, and Josh had said (getting on one knee), Then let me take you away from him.

Surprised by news of their engagement, Mr. Hampton responded in a flat monotone that presaged the mechanical voice he’d use late in life. “That’s not going to happen.”

—

Josh found himself repeating those same words years later, when Cheryl first mentioned her father might visit. Not going to happen. There was no point in discussing it. Cheryl didn’t need reminders of her unhappy childhood and who was responsible. She knew why her mother passed early from their lives and why her sister moved to the opposite coast and never contacted anyone.

“Hear me out,” Cheryl said. She stood in the doorway; Josh sat in the den, the television muted, some client folders balanced on the arm of the couch. “The guest room’s all fixed up,” his wife continued, “but we never have company. It’s going to waste.”

His wife stood separate from him, like a punished child in the corner offering illogical excuses. Her request was dishonest, Josh thought at the time: An empty room doesn’t necessarily cry out for a visitor, especially a troublesome relative.

And then he recalled how distant she’d seemed of late. Secretive.

“I’ve been speaking to Dad,” she said.

Josh didn’t respond.

She stepped closer to him now, the secret out. “He’s apologized to me. For everything.”

“He hasn’t apologized to me.” Even as he spoke, Josh realized the discussion shouldn’t be about his own feelings; it should be about Cheryl, what she suffered in the past, what her husband rescued her from—and how he wouldn’t expose her to that threat again.

“Oh, he does apologize to you, Josh. He’s already said as much.”

He wondered how often his wife had spoken to her father. Wondered if she’d already offered their guest room to him.

“Think about what this would mean to me,” she said. “To be reconciled to my father after all these years. At peace with my past.”

“People like him don’t change.”

“He’s different now,” she said. “He really is.”

“I’m glad you believe that.” Such a dismissive, condescending thing to say, but Josh still couldn’t think his wife was serious. He’d experienced Lewis Hampton’s cruelty firsthand, heard countless unforgivable stories from the same woman who now posed as her father’s advocate. “I can’t talk with you about this now.” Out of guilt, Josh added, “Maybe some other time.”

“We don’t have time,” she said. “He doesn’t, at least. Dad’s ill.”

Throat cancer. The man’s archaic ritual of an after-dinner cigar had finally taken its toll. Or karma finally caught him, Josh was tempted to say.

And then his wife’s hand dropped to her stomach, her palm curved slightly instead of flat.

She’d been secretive, yes. But not only about phone calls with her father.

Josh nearly jumped from his seat, so clumsy that he brushed the stack of folders on the couch arm and they went flying, papers spreading out, and he didn’t care as he rushed to his wife, almost afraid to hug her, the idea of it so fresh and fragile, because she was glowing, really glowing, as she smiled and said: “A child should have a grandfather, don’t you think?”

—

“Call me Lewis.”

Josh barely recognized the man Cheryl led through the front door of their home. Seven years since he’d laid eyes on his father-in-law, yet now he looked decades older. The weight loss made an immediate impression, but more striking was the stoop to his shoulders, the frail uncertainty of his gait as if he’d lost all confidence in his body.

The biggest alteration was in his voice.

Lewis Hampton released the speaker device he’d pressed against his throat, and it dangled at the end of a plastic lanyard. The old man held out an unsteady hand.

Josh hesitated a moment, then accepted it. A handshake is a gentleman’s gesture, easy to perform without considering the implications. Mechanical, like his father-in-law’s new voice.

That evening, their guest sat at the kitchen table while Josh chopped vegetables for a stir-fry. Lewis wore an odd smile, his outdated prejudices no doubt dumbfounded to see a man of the house preparing dinner.

They spoke infrequently during the meal. The device swung loose on its lanyard as Lewis chewed his food. A flesh-colored bandage over his throat incision flapped open on one side as occasional gusts sputtered through the opening. Josh mentioned a few projects at work—the same job his father-in-law previously complained hadn’t been good enough to support a family. Cheryl explained how far along she was in her pregnancy and admitted she hadn’t yet learned the child’s sex.

“I’m not sure we want to know in advance. What do you think, Dad? Should it be a surprise?”

He shrugged and gave a thumbs-up sign—as if to indicate she’d be happy either way, that whatever his daughter decided would be fine.

Maybe the old guy really had changed.

Not enough to help with the after-dinner cleanup, though. He stayed seated at the table while Josh and Cheryl collected the plates and silverware, then rinsed them in the sink.

After a bit, Lewis stood and walked toward his daughter. He seemed like he was working himself up to offer a hug or kiss of reconciliation. Instead, he put a gentle hand on Cheryl’s stomach.

She let him. She didn’t flinch.

Lewis fumbled for the device with his other hand as he leaned closer to her belly. “Hello, little girl,” the mechanical voice said, determining the child’s sex.

Cheryl excused herself for a moment, saying she needed to fix up the guest room. She’d already prepared the room the night before; Josh knew it was a pretext to give him and her father a chance to talk.

He’d found himself puzzling over the man’s behavior the whole evening. This was the same person who, the week before his and Cheryl’s wedding, announced to the whole family, “I won’t be there.” Then added, “Maybe I’ll go to her next one.” Josh squinted for traces of that old spitefulness. Previously, he’d have sworn it was a deeply ingrained personality trait. Could Lewis Hampton really have changed?

They stood in the living room, a handshake’s distance apart. Lewis lifted the device to his throat, pressed his thumb against a side button with each rhythmic syllable. “It can’t be easy having me here.”

Josh nodded. “Cheryl seems glad about it.”

“[You are] good for her.” Lewis misjudged the button presses and the first two syllables didn’t amplify. “Good for her,” the other Lewis might have said, but the artificial voice couldn’t convey any hint of sarcasm.

“I was [wrong] about so many things.” An understandable flub. Many people choke on the word when they admit they’d been wrong.

Josh nodded again, civil. “Cheryl’s going to be a terrific mother,” he said.

“Father, too.”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “I’ll work hard at it. I won’t let Cheryl be disappointed.”

Lewis struggled with the speaker device. A difficult conversation on an emotional level, made even more awkward by illness and technology. “So much. I know. You [can’t] forget. But maybe you can [for]give?”

The man’s eyes sold it. They brimmed with sincerity and barely repressed tears. But he was asking a lot.

“I’ll work hard at it. For Cheryl.”

Lewis seemed pleased by the answer. “I see clear now.” He leaned forward as if he wished to whisper, but there was no volume adjustment on his amplifier. His words echoed through the house, and Josh knew his wife could hear everything as easily as if she’d been in the room with them. “Cancer [is] the best thing. That ever hap[pened] to me.”

And Josh wanted to feel generous, then. Not just to please Cheryl but for his own sake. Anger is poison. If his wife could make peace with the past, he could, too.

Yet he couldn’t shake the sense that, with this unexpected reunion, Lewis had stolen something from him: that long-ago act of heroism seven years ago, when Josh played the knight in shining armor who rescued his wife from a fierce dragon. Now the dragon was age-stricken and feeble; he no longer blew bluster and smoke and fire but sputtered sad phrases from a hole beneath his chin.

—

At first, Lewis visited once a month. He’d drive out on a Saturday, then leave Sunday afternoon.

As Cheryl’s due date loomed, she raised the possibility of an extended visit. “He might be a bit of help once the baby’s born.”

Yes, Josh thought. Your father’s parenting skills were so noteworthy in the past. Out loud, he said, “Lewis would have you waiting on him hand and foot.”

“I don’t think so.” Cheryl had recently taken over Josh’s traditional end of the sofa, with her legs propped on the coffee table. “He’s made more of an effort to pitch in. Haven’t you noticed?”

“If you mean cleaning up half of his own mess, that still leaves the other half for us.”

Cheryl laughed. “You’re right.” She absently scratched the side of her leg. Her skin got so dry during this third trimester, and Josh often had to remind her to use lotion on her legs and on her stomach. “But my school’s being so generous with maternity leave, and I think I’d like some adult company during the day. Your parents are so far away.” True enough. Josh’s parents had transferred to an army base in Arizona. And his own stingy employer would only grant him two days’ leave once the baby was born.

“I never thought I’d have cause to say this,” Cheryl continued, “but I like my father. I like the person he is now.”

“You’re scratching again.” Josh lifted a bottle of Lubriderm from the small wicker basket his wife used as a makeshift medicine caddy. “Let me put some on.” He squeezed some lotion into his palm, then breathed over it so the lotion wouldn’t be too cool on her legs.

As he applied the skin cream, Cheryl asked, “Do you like him now?”

Josh focused on his task, giving himself time to measure his response. When he was done, he said, “I can’t find fault with him.”

An honest answer, since Josh had been looking for faults. Each encounter, he sought some terrible subtext hidden within those monotone phrases, some residue of spite from the earlier Lewis Hampton—the real Lewis Hampton, Josh couldn’t help but think. But he could never prove it.

He tried another tactic. “I’ve been worried about something. His mechanical voice. Do you think it might… frighten the baby?”

Cheryl put her hands over her stomach, as if shielding the baby’s ears. “Lydia will be fine.” They’d learned they were having a girl, had already settled on her name. “She’ll meet Dad right away, so she’ll get used to his voice.”

—

One day, Josh came home from work to find Lewis had pulled a kitchen chair into the den. He’d placed it next to the couch so he could sit close to Cheryl’s eighth-month belly. Lewis held open a storybook Josh’s parents sent from Arizona, an Old McDonald type of book with lots of pictures.

He was reading all the text to their unborn child, including sound effects for the animals. Moo for the robot cow. Baaa for the robot sheep. The same loud tones for the gobble-gobble of a robot turkey.

As he and Cheryl got ready for bed that night, he protested. “You don’t think it’s strange?”

“It was practically your idea,” she said. “I mentioned to Dad how you thought the baby might be frightened by his voice. He’s helping us get a head start.”

Josh sighed. He mentioned how other families play Mozart to their baby in the womb. The child hears whispers and soft cooing from the parents. “We should do that instead, don’t you think?”

Cheryl gave him a cool stare. “Lydia kicks when she’s upset, and she was perfectly still while Dad read to her. She’s more upset right now by your raised voice, to be honest.”

—

The birth went smoothly. They rushed to the hospital only a few days earlier than the due date. The epidural did its work—though Cheryl had a few rather expressive moments during delivery.

When Josh first held Lydia, the moment was indescribable. He wanted his daughter all to himself. He didn’t want anybody else to touch her.

The hospital towel seemed unworthy—too rough against Lydia’s fresh, pink skin. Josh supported the back of her head, the way he’d learned from the parenting DVDs.

How long would he get to cradle his daughter in his arms? Cheryl had her for nine months; now it was his turn.

Josh brushed aside his selfish thoughts. “Let’s see Mommy,” he said in a soft, childish voice he didn’t know he had. Saying “Mommy” out loud, having it be true, overwhelmed him with unexpected warmth and love.

Cheryl looked exhausted but content, too excited to rest. He brought Lydia close, and she smiled at child and husband equally.

“Where’s Dad?” she said.

Josh lifted his daughter to his face, then whispered nonsense syllables into the tiniest ear he’d ever seen. He took his time, waiting to cradle Lydia in the crook of his arm before answering his wife. “He’s in the waiting room. I was going to call my parents in a minute, share the good news with them and Lewis at the same time.”

“Get Dad,” Cheryl said. “He should be here now.”

“Okay.” Reluctantly, he lowered his daughter onto the hospital bed beside Cheryl, then left to find his father-in-law.

The old man was grinning ear to ear when Josh found him. Neither of them had to say a word.

Lewis followed him to the delivery room, his usual weary gait replaced by an enthusiastic scramble. His ever-present limp had nearly disappeared.

He hunched over Cheryl’s bedside. His arms reached out.

No, Josh thought. Don’t touch our child. You haven’t seen the DVDs.

“Go ahead,” Cheryl said.

His hand reached closer to their infant.

You don’t belong here, Josh thought. This place is sacred. You’re not worthy.

Instead, Lewis closed his hand around the dangling speaker device. He held it to his throat and said to Cheryl, “She’s perfect.”

Then to his granddaughter he said, “You are beautiful. [Beau]tiful tiny girl.”

Josh wondered what his wife must be thinking. This was the kind of praise the earlier Lewis Hampton had never bothered to bestow upon his own children. She should resent him, even now. Especially now.

Cheryl smiled. On her back on the mattress, the baby waved her arms. She reached blindly for the strange, familiar sound.

“I could [just] eat you up,” Lewis said.

—

Many parents brace themselves for competition over the new baby’s affection. When PopPop visits, he’s not at work or finishing home projects: He can devote all his time to playing with his grandkids. Same for Mee-Maw, who bakes cookies instead of steamed broccoli and lets the kids stay up late when she babysits. Grandparents never have to punish their grandkids. Their visit is always a special occasion, while parents—with the tougher, permanent job—get taken for granted.

But Josh hadn’t braced himself. His parents lived on the other side of the country and he knew they’d rarely visit. Cheryl’s mother had passed away, and her father… well, he was supposed to be out of the picture.

He’d always assumed he and Cheryl would be the sole important adults in their child’s earliest years. No competition.

So he let himself indulge in some resentment at his father-in-law’s unlikely return. He grew angry, almost, at Lewis’s stubborn refusal to revert to former behaviors—a crude or cruel comment that would justify denying him further access to their home and child.

I knew you hadn’t changed, Josh would say, and Cheryl would stand firm in agreement. They’d usher Lewis to the front door and slam it after him. Banished.

But he never slipped up. He’d actually mellowed into a sweet older man. He was even funny sometimes, the comical effect typically heightened by the strange contrast of his voice to the content of his words. Although he stayed even-tempered with people, and was perfectly tender with Lydia, he frequently got flustered with inanimate objects.

The voice device itself was a frequent target. “Holy mother. Can never get this damn thing to work,” he might say—of course, during a rare moment he managed to pulse out each syllable flawlessly. “Out [of] my way, darn table,” after he barked his shin against the furniture. “Fort Knox bread ties,” he said, then handed the sealed package to Josh for help. An awkward battle with disposable diapers was especially funny: “evil stick tape,” he said, then tried to buzz out a word that sounded like origami. Especially memorable was that diatribe at a Marie Callender’s TV entrée, the time he’d tried to fix his own meal.

Josh grew to appreciate the occasional bits of amusement his father-in-law provided. Those first weeks at home with Lydia were exhausting. Such a beautiful child, a joy most of the time, but needing so much attention. The feeding, the changing, the lifting and singing to, the dancing distractions of rattles and colored lights and bean-bag animals. Josh had never imagined life could be this full and this challenging.

Because when their daughter began to cry, almost nothing could stop her. Without warning—no flash of mischief in her eyes or even a slight downturn of her tiny mouth—Lydia would launch into a marathon stretch of wracking sobs and shrieks. Josh and Cheryl always checked first to see if she was hungry or if her diaper was wet, then would wear themselves out trying to calm her. Among the trial-and-error amusements they paraded before their daughter’s attention, none could be guaranteed to work. Lydia didn’t have a favorite blanket or toy, and the rubber-tipped pacifier rarely lived up to its advertised function. During such moments, she sounded like she was in agony: It pained them to hear their daughter’s cries, both from the siren-shrill piercing that drilled headaches through their eardrums and from the overwhelming fear and emotional empathy that affected parents of any newborn.

Only one thing worked with any reliability: the mechanical, strangely comforting voice of Lydia’s grandfather.

—

“Let [me] try.”

“No, Dad, we’ve got to learn.” Cheryl reached up to flick the mobile above Lydia’s crib, then cupped the hand back over her ear. Josh wore a brave smile, his fingers plugged in his ears. “Look at the butterflies, Lydia. Pretty colors.”

Lewis moved to the crib, leaned close, and pressed his speaker device to the hole in his throat. “Butt [-erflies], Lydia. Pretty [butter-] flies, Lydia.”

The infant fell immediately quiet. Her eyes turned to her grandfather, small arms lifted, tiny fingers grasping his mechanical words from the air.

“I don’t believe it,” Cheryl said. “She’s actually cooing. Isn’t she, Josh?”

—

The comforting ability of Lewis Hampton’s voice was an undeniable gift. It brought rest and routine back into the household. Sanity.

“Aren’t you glad now that he’s staying with us?” Cheryl would say, and Josh couldn’t deny it.

His father-in-law had become a crucial part of their home. If he’d wanted, Lewis could have blackmailed them: Get me a new color television for my bedroom, or I’ll stop speaking to Lydia. You wouldn’t want that, would you? A protection racket with the looming threat of siren days and sleepless wailing nights. Lewis could have run the household according to his own petty whims, demanding elaborate meals or a nicer lounge chair in the den. He could kick his feet back, smoke his favorite cigars, slip into the Hydelike cruelty he favored during Cheryl’s youth and teenage years. He could insult his son-in-law mercilessly, insist that the marriage was a mistake and that they deserved a screaming child. Lydia knows how worthless her father is. That’s why she’s so upset. He could say or do whatever he wanted. They needed him now.

But Lewis never lapsed into tyranny, never asked anything in return. His baby granddaughter’s love was its own reward.

Josh couldn’t help but reflect bitterly on the irony—this hated figure from his past now cast in such a generous light. Cheryl’s voice was melodic, so why wasn’t it enough to soothe their daughter? Or why not her own father’s goofy smile and charming, ineffective singsong? Their baby girl, too young to make a choice, had somehow decided to favor Lewis’s voice over those of her own parents.

A reluctant gratitude usually overwhelmed his resentment. He began to believe, like Cheryl, that his father-in-law had become a different person.

He couldn’t imagine raising their daughter without Lewis’s help.

—

“He’s not going to be around forever.”

Cheryl’s comment seemed to come out of nowhere. Minutes earlier, the baby’s cry had startled them from a sound sleep. Paternal instinct tensed through him, and a residue of dread from their infant’s earliest days fluttered through Josh’s drowsy thoughts: Whose turn is it? How long will she cry? How long will one of us sit and sing by her cradle or rock her in our arms, the senseless agonized wails continuing oblivious to our efforts—as if we’re not there, as if we don’t matter to her—and Josh would know tomorrow’s workday would be a sleepwalking disaster, like the day before, and the day before that. But then, a sputter and mechanical buzz from the guest room recalled the current arrangement: the baby’s crib beside their father-in-law’s bed, the old man’s robot tones quieting her almost instantly. No need to worry: Relief washed over him, and the pull of peaceful sleep beckoned.

“It’s what you wanted.” Josh lifted the covers tighter to his neck, practically burrowing his head into the pillow. “I’m happy your father’s here to get us through this rough patch.” He knew Lydia’s crying phase wouldn’t last; once their daughter learned to sleep through the night, they’d revisit the old man’s visiting privileges.

“I didn’t want to tell you,” Cheryl said, “but I can’t stop thinking about it. Dad’s cancer is worse. It’s spreading.”

Josh pushed his elbows against the mattress and sat up. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.” He put an arm around his wife and hugged her close.

A malicious thought occurred to him, explaining how his father-in-law could maintain the saintly behavior. Lewis knew he only had to keep the act going for a limited time.

—

The old man seemed especially frail the next day. His sleeves looked like they didn’t have arms in them, and his legs were almost as thin as broomsticks. Josh wondered why he hadn’t noticed the change.

“Cheryl told me.” He put a gentle hand on Lewis’s shoulder. Oddly positioned knots of bone seemed to shift beneath the fabric.

Lewis raised the device to his neck. “I’m [at] peace,” he droned. “Ready to go [when] my time comes.”

“That’s a good way to look at it,” Josh said.

—

Another night, Lydia’s cries again woke them. Josh endured his familiar pattern of panic, followed by relief that Lewis would calm her, drifting back to sleep, head pressed hard against the pillow, blanket pulled up over his head, the fabric fisted into a knot and pressed against his ear—because she’s still crying, an end-of-the-world wail, a primal expression of fear and abandonment. Josh brought his knees closer to his stomach, buried his head between blanket and pillow to block the sound.

Cheryl shook him. Gently at first, then more urgent, her voice drifting from the end of a long tunnel: “Honey. Something’s wrong.”

He rolled out of bed, stumbled toward the beacon of their daughter’s cries. His wife followed behind.

They’d woken in the middle of an air raid. A fire alarm blared a deadly warning.

They reached the guest room to the right, across the hall. A closed door partly muffled Lydia’s wail.

Josh was afraid to open it. The sounds would be even louder on the other side. They would hit him like an explosion.

Cheryl shouted through the door: “Dad? You okay?”

Josh put his hand on the knob. He hesitated.

Because an awful image flashed into his mind. Lewis Hampton, that frail old man, wasn’t in his bed. He’d somehow found fresh strength and agility, and had leaped over the bars of the baby’s crib and climbed inside. He crouched over Lydia, his stick legs bent like an insect’s. An awful curve distorted his spine, ridged bumps appearing along his naked back. Dark bristles sprouted from his thin arms, and the pincers at the end snapped menacingly over their baby’s head. A black ichor dripped out of the opening in the old man’s throat and plashed in curdled drops onto Lydia’s cheeks. The child took a breath, opened wide to scream anew, and a gurgle as thick as chewed tobacco fell from the hovering throat hole and into her mouth.

Josh threw open the door.

He immediately put his hands over his ears, then waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark.

Their daughter lay on her back in the crib, eyes open, arms and legs flailing as she cried out.

Lewis was sprawled across the guest bed. One arm dangled off the edge. The other reached to his throat, an index finger hooked inside the wound as if trying to clear a clogged drain.

Cheryl flipped the light switch, then ran to her father’s bedside. She shook him, waved a hand over his unblinking eyes. She tugged at the finger he’d stuck into his throat wound, but it wouldn’t budge: His frail body lifted slightly from the bed, then dropped.

Josh took their daughter from the crib, tried bouncing her, sang “Hush Little Baby,” kissed his finger and touched it to her mouth. His wife dialed 911.

Lewis looked tiny in the bed. As if, even now, he was shrinking into insignificance.

The baby continued to shriek.

Josh’s family was his own again.

—

Lydia cried nonstop at the funeral. She was too young to understand grief, but everyone in attendance agreed the child expressed genuine loss.

His wife explained the baby’s behavior with a phrase that became all too common in the weeks that followed: “She misses her grandfather.”

—

Cheryl returned to work after her extended maternity leave and the bereavement days for her father. The daycare center beside her school quickly decided Lydia was too much for them. She “upset the other children.”

Josh offered the babysitter earplugs. “It’s okay to wear these, as long as you can see her.” He then pointed to their Bose stereo system. “Music sometimes helps. It helps you, I mean. Not the baby.”

They worried that the fits were getting worse and more frequent. The next doctor visit, they both took off work to attend: Two adults could present a united front. There is something wrong. Isn’t there some test you haven’t done? This can’t be normal.

Josh was actually grateful their daughter slipped into one of her fits during the visit. Good. He can hear this, too. Now he’ll have to believe.

Lydia wriggled on the examination table. “My,” the pediatrician said. “Oh, my.” He shone a penlight into the baby’s eyes, prodded her stomach, felt the pulse along her wrists and ankles. “She’s got a powerful set of lungs on her.” He tried to disguise a wince as he removed the sound-amplifying stethoscope. “Maybe she’ll turn out to be an opera singer.”

More like the victim in a horror movie, Josh considered responding.

“I don’t see the point in ordering further tests. Her behavior is within the normal range.” The doctor had to shout to be heard, which undercut the intended calm of his diagnosis. “This pattern will stop eventually.”

“When?” Cheryl asked. “At four months? Five? Next year? And are you sure there isn’t something wrong with her? Something terribly wrong?”

The doctor offered a measured response, ending with a quick, shouted summary: “She’ll be fine.” As they compared notes afterward, Cheryl recalled him saying, “I predict she’ll be better in no time.” The way Josh heard it was: “I can’t predict. These things take time.”

—

Nights continued to exhaust them. They had moved Lydia’s crib back to their own bedroom to monitor her better. When it was “Josh’s night,” he’d scoop her up, with the blanket bundle and a rattle toy, and would take her downstairs to a rocking chair he’d moved to a corner of the kitchen.

He’d tested that spot as the farthest from their bedroom, hoping the sound would diminish over distance. He’d be a zombie at work tomorrow, but at least Cheryl might get some sleep that night.

He had the pacifier, too, but Lydia turned her head if he attempted to push the rubber tip into her mouth. He took a bottle of her formula from the refrigerator, then tried to feed her, but again no effect.

As often happened, Josh blamed himself. He wasn’t inventive enough, or he lacked simple fatherly skills that came so naturally to others.

He realized he didn’t often describe his daughter with love: compliment the shape of her nose, the way her cheeks puffed up when she smiled. The wispy golden silk of her hair, now just beginning to curl. That kind of praise, expressed with a father’s genuine pride, might be what was needed.

“You’re so pretty.” He gently poked at her stomach, made a tickle sound. “You’re my pretty girl.”

Even as Lydia’s face scrunched tight, mouth open, eyes flashing with rage and cheeks blister-red.

It’s like she just wanted to cry.

Josh lifted the corner of the blanket. Soft cotton, a pretty pattern of pink and white stripes. He crumpled the corner into a ball, judged the size of his daughter’s open mouth.

A gag, only. He’d remove it if she had trouble breathing.

He was so tired. What if he pushed the blanket into her mouth, pressed his hand over it to further muffle the sound, and what if he accidently covered her nose as well? And what if he fell asleep?

Josh, what are you doing?

Cheryl, in her nightdress, stood in the kitchen doorway. Her voice carried loud and clear. He was afraid to look in his lap.

She misses her grandfather. Are you taking her to him?

Josh heard himself say, “Yes, Yes, that’s what I’m doing. Would that be so bad, really? Our daughter favors him over us. We get proof of that every day, every night…”

Then Lydia’s scream came back, full force.

It had never faded. Josh looked at the wailing baby in his lap, then back to the doorway where he thought he’d seen his wife. Her voice had been too clear. He never could have heard her over Lydia’s cries.

A political prisoner suffered similar distress: sleep deprivation, continual loud noises to interrupt rational thought. His will was broken; hallucinations prompted him to consider the unthinkable.

But what if…? What if that vision of his wife had proposed the best solution?

Josh didn’t know why the idea hadn’t occurred to him earlier. Take Lydia to her grandfather. She misses him.

Or rather, Bring Lewis here. Through mimicry.

—

He’d never brought home his imitation of Lewis’s mechanical voice. His wife, certainly, wouldn’t have seen the humor in it. And now that his father-in-law had passed on, the idea seemed to be in especially poor taste.

But now he was alone with his inconsolable daughter. Her grandfather had been the only one who could comfort her. His strange voice, at least.

Could he still do the imitation? And what should he say?

Josh cupped one hand behind his daughter’s head, and he brought his mouth close to her ear.

“Hush, little girl,” he said in a slow monotone. “Quiet, little Lydia.”

Josh couldn’t hear himself very well, but he knew the voice didn’t quite come out right. Lydia kept crying, but a hint of interest crept into her eyes.

“Recognize me?” Josh buzzed and droned. “Who does Daddy sound like?”

Lydia seemed fascinated, but she didn’t stop crying.

Josh figured out the problem: His imitation lacked authenticity. He was an actor who didn’t believe in the character he portrayed.

Because he’d never believed in this current incarnation of Lewis Hampton: the same man who, while raising his own daughter, insulted her on a daily basis. When Josh courted Cheryl, witnessing the oppressive atmosphere Lewis created in their home, he had always wondered: How can a father treat his own child this way? His own beautiful, innocent daughter? A parent isn’t allowed to think such things, let along speak them aloud, yet Lewis hadn’t seemed to care.

That part of Lewis was missing from Josh’s attempt at mimicry. But he didn’t dare incorporate such awful messages into his imitation.

Then he remembered a joke he and his brother used to play with the family dog. You could say anything to Prince, as long as the tone of your voice remained sweet and loving. Would you like to go back to the pound? We can take you there, and have you put to sleep. And the dog would run to the front door, excited to go outside. How would you like me to cut off your tail, boy? Slice it clean off with a kitchen knife? And that same tail would wag happily.

Josh realized it didn’t matter what he said.

It would be okay to talk to his daughter with Lewis Hampton’s robotic, cancer-ravaged voice, and to evoke the real Lewis with each word choice.

Stop crying now, he buzzed near Lydia’s ear. Or I’ll beat the living daylights out of you.

The baby gave a quick hiccup, then took a sharp intake of breath as if ready to enter a fresh bout of screaming.

You’re ugly and useless, his version of her grandfather said. You’re ruining this family.

Lydia grew instantly calm.

—

The next morning, Josh opened the bedroom curtains and blinds to let some sunlight through. Cheryl was still in bed, waking gently before the rude shock of their alarm clock.

She rolled in bed, blinking, a raised hand blocking the light—obviously surprised to find herself feeling so well rested. A sudden rush of fear washed over her: The night had been silent, too silent. “The baby?”

“Sleeping.” Josh crossed from the window and stood beside the crib. “Last night, your daughter and I came to a kind of agreement.”

As if in answer, Lydia’s shape stirred beneath her pink and white blanket. After a familiar intake of breath, she began her signature wail.

“Oh, here we go again,” his wife said. She winced and began to get out of bed.

“No, no,” Josh said. “Allow me.” He lifted the baby and brought her head close to his mouth.

Josh had one particular advantage over his father-in-law’s voice box. He could lower his volume, practically whisper into his infant daughter’s ear.

The baby would hear him, but his wife would not. Cheryl wouldn’t know that he imitated her father. She wouldn’t know the exact words he spoke.

I wish you’d never been born, he whispered.

The mechanical buzz cut beneath the child’s shrill wail. Lydia stopped crying.

“That’s amazing,” Cheryl said. “What did you do?”

“I guess some of your father finally rubbed off on me,” Josh said. He set the calmed baby back down, then gave a token shake to the butterfly mobile above her crib.

Josh took comfort in the fact that his infant daughter couldn’t comprehend his words.

But someday, she would.

The Situations

Joyce Carol Oates

I.

Kittens

Daddy was driving us home. Three of us in the backseat and Lula, who was his favorite, in the passenger’s seat.

Lula cried, Oh, Daddy!—look.

At the side of the road, in broken grasses, was something small and furry-white, which appeared to be alive.

Oh, Daddy, please.

Daddy laughed. Daddy braked the car to a stop. Lula jumped out of the car. We ran back with her, to discover in the broken grasses three small kittens—white, with black and russet markings.

We picked up the kittens! They were so tiny, fitting in the palms of our hands, weighing only a few ounces! Each was mewing, its eyes scarcely open. Oh, oh!—we’d never seen anything so wonderful in our lives! We ran back to the car, where Daddy was waiting, to beg Daddy to take them home with us.

At first, Daddy said no. Daddy said the kittens would make messes in the car.

Lula said, Oh, Daddy, please. We all promised to clean up any messes the kittens made.

So Daddy gave in. Daddy loved Lula best, but we were happy to be Daddy’s children, too.

In the backseat, we had two of the little kittens. In the front, Lula was holding the whitest kitten.

We were so excited! So happy with the kittens! Lula said she would call the whitest kitten Snowflake, and we said we would call our little kittens Pumpkin and Cinder because Pumpkin had orange splotches in his white fur and Cinder had black splotches in his white fur.

For some minutes, Daddy drove in silence. We did all the chattering! You could hear tiny mews, if you listened hard.

Then Daddy said, Do I smell a mess?

We cried, No, no!

I think I smell a mess.

No, Daddy!

Three messes. I smell them.

No, Daddy!

(And this was so: None of the kittens had made messes.)

But Daddy braked the car to a stop. At the bridge over the river where there is a steep ramp, outside our town and about two miles from our house, Daddy parked the car and said to Lula, Give me Snowflake, and Daddy squinted at us in the rearview mirror and said, Give me Pumpkin, and give me Cinder.

We began to cry. Lula cried loudest. But Daddy grabbed the little kitten from her and reached into the backseat red-faced and frowning to grab Pumpkin and Cinder from us. We were not strong enough, and we were not brave enough to keep Daddy from taking the kittens from us, in Daddy’s big hand. The kittens were mewing loudly by this time and quivering in terror.

Daddy left the car and with big Daddy strides climbed the ramp to the bridge and threw the kittens over the railing. Three tiny things rising at first against the misty sky, then quickly falling, and gone.

When Daddy returned to the car, Lula cried, Daddy, why?

Daddy said, Because I am Daddy, who decides how things end.

II.

Feral Kiss

In secret, by foot, he traveled to the Mainland. He lived on an island of approximately eight square miles, boot-shaped like Italy. Between the Island and the Mainland was a two-mile floating bridge. His parents had forbidden him to journey to the Mainland; the Mainland was the “easy, slack life”; the Island was the life of discipline, severity, God’s will. His parents had broken off ties with their relatives who lived on the Mainland, who in turn pitied the Islanders as uneducated, superstitious, and impoverished.

On the Island, there were colonies of feral cats, much inbred, ferocious if cornered or trapped, but surpassingly beautiful—one of the colonies was composed predominantly of flamey-orange tiger cats with six toes; another was predominantly midnight-black cats with tawny eyes; another was predominantly white, long-haired cats with glaring green eyes; and another, the largest colony, predominantly tortoiseshell cats with intricate stone-colored, silver, and black markings and golden eyes, seemed to thrive in a rough, rock-strewn area near the floating bridge. It was generally forbidden for Island children to approach the feral cats, or to feed them; it was dangerous for anyone to approach the cats in the hope of petting them, still less capturing one of them and bringing it home; even small kittens were known to scratch and bite furiously. Yet, on his way to the Mainland, as he approached the floating bridge, he couldn’t resist tossing bits of food to the tortoiseshell cats who regarded him from a little distance with flat, hostile eyes—Kitty? Kitty? Such beautiful creatures! One day, brashly, he managed to seize hold of a young tortoiseshell cat scarcely more than a kitten, very thin, with prominent ribs and high, alert ears, and for a moment, he held its quivering life in his fingers like his own heart seized out of his chest—then the cat squirmed frantically, hissed, scratched, and sank its small, sharp teeth into the flesh at the base of his thumb, and he released it with a little cry Damn! and wiped the blood on his pant leg and continued on his journey across the floating bridge.

On the Mainland, he saw her: a girl he imagined to be his own age, or a little younger, walking with other children. The coastal wind was shrouded with mist, damply cold, relentless. Droplets of moisture had formed on his eyelashes like tears. Her long hair whipped in the wind. Her perfect face was turned from him in shyness, or in coyness. He’d grown daring, brash; his experience with the tortoiseshell cat hadn’t discouraged but seemed to have encouraged him. He was a boy pretending to be a man here on the Mainland, where he felt to himself older, more confident. And here no one knew his name or the name of his family. He walked with the girl, drawing her away from the other children. He asked to know her name—Mariana. He held her small hand, which resisted his initially as he clutched at it. He kissed her on the lips, lightly yet with much excitement. When she didn’t draw away, he kissed her again, with more force. She turned aside as if to run from him. But he clutched her hand and her arm; he gripped her tight and kissed her so hard he felt the imprint of her teeth against his. It seemed that she was kissing him in return, though less forcefully. She pulled away. She snatched his hand and, laughing, bit him on the inside of the thumb, the soft flesh at the base of the thumb. In astonishment, he stared at the quick-flowing blood. The wound was so small and yet—so much blood! His pant legs were stained. His boots were splattered. He retreated, and the girl ran to catch up with the other children—all of them running together, he saw now, along the wide, rough beach littered with storm debris, their laughter high-pitched and taunting, and not one of them glanced back.

Gripped suddenly by a fear that the bridge had floated away, he returned to the floating bridge. But there it remained, buffeted by coastal winds and looking smaller and more weathered. It was late autumn. He could not recall the season in which he’d started out—had it been summer? Spring? The sea lifted in angry, churning waves. The Island was near invisible behind a shroud of mist. In the waves, he saw the faces of his older, Island kin. Gray-bearded men, frowning women. He was breathless returning to the Island across the rocking, floating bridge. At shore, he paid no heed to the colony of tortoiseshell cats that seemed to be awaiting him with small, taunting mews and sly cat faces, amid the rocks. The wound at the base of his thumb hurt; he was ashamed of his injury, the perceptible marks of small sharp teeth in his flesh. Within a few days, the wound became livid, and with a fishing knife cauterized in flame, he reopened the wound, to let the blood flow hotly again. He wrapped the base of his thumb in a bandage. He explained that he’d injured himself carelessly on a rusted nail or hook. He returned to his life that soon swept over him like waves rising onto the beach, streaming through the rocks. There would be a day when he removed the bandage and saw the tiny serrated scar in the flesh, all but healed. In secret, he would kiss the scar in a swoon of emotion, but in time, he would cease to remember why.

III.

Hope

Daddy was driving us home. Just two of us in the backseat and Esther, who was Daddy’s favorite, in the passenger’s seat.

Esther cried, Oh, Daddy!—look out!

A dark-furry creature was crossing the road in front of Daddy’s car, legs moving rapidly. It might have been a large cat, or a young fox. Daddy did not slacken his speed for an instant—he did not turn the wheel or brake the car to avoid hitting the creature, but he did not appear to press down on the gas pedal to strike it deliberately.

The right front wheel struck it with a small thud.

There was a sharp little cry, then silence.

Oh, Daddy, please. Please stop.

Esther’s voice was thin and plaintive, and though it was a begging sort of voice, it was a voice without hope.

Daddy laughed. Daddy did not brake the car to a stop.

In the back, we knelt on the seat to peer out the rear window—seeing, in the broken grasses at the side of the road, the furry creature writhing in agony.

Daddy—stop! Daddy, please stop, the animal is hurt.

But our voices were thin and plaintive and without hope, and Daddy paid little heed to us but continued driving and humming to himself, and in the front seat Esther was crying in her soft, helpless way, and in the backseat we were very quiet.

One of us whispered to the other, That was a kitty!

The other whispered, That was a fox!

At the bridge over the river where there’s a steep ramp, Daddy braked the car to a stop. Daddy was frowning and irritable, and Daddy said to Esther, Get out of the car. And Daddy turned, grunting to us in the backseat, and Daddy’s eyes were glaring angry as he told us to get out of the car.

We were very frightened. Yet there was no place to hide in the back of Daddy’s car.

Outside, Esther was shivering. A chill wind blew from the mist-shrouded river. We huddled with Esther as Daddy approached.

In Daddy’s face, there was regret and remorse. But it was remorse for something that had not yet happened and could not be avoided. Calmly Daddy struck Esther a blow to the back with his fist that knocked her down like a shot, so breathless she couldn’t scream or cry at first but lay on the ground, quivering. We wanted to run away but dared not, for Daddy’s long legs would catch up with us, we knew.

Daddy struck us, one and then the other. One on the back, as Esther had been struck, and the other a glancing careless blow on the side of the head as if in this case (my case) the child was so hopeless, he was beyond disciplining. Oh, oh, oh!—we had learned to stifle our cries.

In long Daddy strides, Daddy returned to the car to smoke a cigarette. This had happened before but not quite in this way, and so when a thing happens in a way resembling a prior way, it is more upsetting than if it had not happened before, ever in any way. On the lumpy ground in broken and desiccated grasses, we lay sobbing, trying to catch our breaths. Esther, who was the oldest, recovered first, crawled to Kevin and me, and helped us sit up and stand on our shaky stick legs. We were dazed with pain and also with the sick sensation that comes to you when you have not expected something to happen as it did, but, as it begins to happen, you remember that you have in fact experienced it before, and this fact determines, in the way of a sequence of bolts locking a sequence of doors, the certitude that it will recur.

In the car, Daddy sat smoking. The driver’s door was open partway, but still the car was filling with bluish smoke like mist.

Between Esther and Daddy, there was a situation unique to Esther and Daddy, as it had once been unique to Lula and Daddy: If Esther had disappointed Daddy, and had been punished for disappointing Daddy, Esther was allowed, perhaps even expected, to refer to this punishment, provided Esther did not challenge Daddy or disappoint Daddy further. A clear, simple question posted by Esther to Daddy often seemed, to our surprise, to be welcomed.

Esther said, with a catch in her throat, Oh, Daddy, why?

Daddy said, “Because I am Daddy, whose children must never give up hope.”

The Corpse King

Tim Curran

I have made candles of infant’s fat,

The sextons have been my slaves,

I have bottled babes unborn, and dried

Hearts and livers from rifled graves.

—Robert Southey

1

From the fields of the dead, the harvest was brought forth.

Tended by resurrection farmers with grubby fingers, cold hearts, and greedy minds, the fields were worked with shovel and spade and sweat. Beneath a pall of thin moonlight, the crops were plucked from the moist, black earth, torn from wormy boxes and mildewed shrouds like rotting corn from corrupting husks. The harvest of cadavers was piled in the beds of muddy wagons and taken to market, sold to the highest bidder to supply dissection room and anatomical house. The farmers worked their bone fields night after night, thinking they were alone in their grim harvest. But there was another who worked the graveyards and mortuaries, another reaper whose cultivation reached back to antiquity.

Moon-faced and skeleton-fingered, he was the grand lord of the charnel harvest, master of graveyard harrow and yield.

2

Long after the mourners and weepers sought the higher, drier ground of the city, Samuel Clow stood in the graveyard, his narrow face latticed by shadow, his grubby hands gripping a short dagger-shaped wooden spade. Somebody had slit open the leaden, fat underbelly of the heavens and its blood poured earthward. It fell and became a rain that washed the color from the world until it stood shivering and dripping in a dozen hues of gray. It turned the graveyard into a bog of yellow, sucking mud, creating rivers and creeks and finally, a great inland sea of slopping charnel muck.

“A lovely night it is for such work,” Clow said, water dripping from the brim of his John Bull top hat. “What I’ll do for a pint sometimes even amazes me.”

“Aye, but you cannot be blamed for your choice of occupations, things being what they are,” Mickey Kierney said from the open grave, grunting and puffing, throwing out clods of wet earth onto a canvas sheet heaped with sodden dirt.

Clow was tall and narrow, his hair long and greasy, falling over a sharp, bony face in strands like wet straw. Kierney, on the other hand, was short and thick and muscular, his face bovine and streaked with dirt. He had once been described by his father as looking like “a silly pig.”

Rain washed Clow’s face like tears and a cold drizzle seeped down the back of his neck. The sky above was a roiling firmament of swollen clouds, black and gray, backlit by struggling rays of moonlight. The graveyard below was slowly filling like a drum, rainwater creating pools and swamps from which the leaning tombstones jutted like rotting teeth. Crosses, steeple-shaped markers, and stone angels were tangled with ribbons of shadow. Crumbling slabs had drowned and high, weed-choked sepulchers were sinking into that mud ocean like the masts of ships.

Clow looked out across the dire, funerary landscape, on guard for those who would take an interest in the work of resurrectionists, but on such a night the storm had driven the pious to bed and hearthside. So much the better.

The shaded lantern threw a somber yellow light that reflected off puddles and saturated earth, created wild, leaping shadows that crept along the desolate ivy faces and wrought-iron doors of burial vaults.

A draft horse and buckboard waited in the downpour on the winding dirt road beyond. The horse—Old Clem—shook his flanks. All around, Clow could hear the scratching and stirrings of the big rats that haunted the cemetery.

“Think I’ve hit something in me digging,” Kierney said, his shovel thudding against wood. He rapped it a few times, scraped mud away from what he had revealed. “What do you suppose could be down here, Samuel Clow? I’m thinking I don’t like this, not at all.”

Clow hung his frock coat from a tall, chipped mortuary urn and pulled Kierney up out of the grave. Donning his apron, he jumped down himself, brushing mud aside until he felt the rough-hewn surface of the pine box beneath his hands.

“Aye, you’ve found something, all right,” he said, pawing dirt away from the top. “Me thinks it be the Devil’s work, so pass down them hooks and bring Old Clem yonder.”

They had opened the grave only enough to expose the upper third of the coffin. This would be enough for what they had to do. Two iron hooks were lowered on ropes to Clow, and he inserted their tips under the upper lip of the lid. He arranged sacking over the coffin so the sound of the rent wood would be muffled. Then he crawled up out of the hole, wind-driven rain drenching all the spots it had missed before. The draft horse was unharnessed and led through the forest of headstones, the ends of the ropes attached to his collar and bit.

“All right, let’s do it, then,” Clow said.

Clem was led forward, the ropes snapped taut, hooks digging in for purchase. Moving forward at a casual walk, Clem put his back into it and there was a muted cracking as the lid was snapped free.

As Kierney hooked Clem back up to trace and lines, Clow said, “I blame me poor upbringing for all this. Me father was a drunk and me mother a whore. The old man would beat us awake at cockcrow each day and me six brothers and sisters would warm ourselves over a lump of lukewarm coal. We breakfasted on dry leaves and rainwater, then a good beating we received and off to work we’d go.”

“Is no wonder you turned out so poorly,” Kierney said. “But did he beat you with his hands?”

“Aye, he did.”

“Well, that explains why you’re so soft, then. Me old man used an iron bar. Beat us bloody with it, buggered us, then made us chew a mouthful of raw gravel. Was a wonderful childhood I had.”

It was a good lark going on like that, but Clow didn’t care to think of his childhood. It had been dark and dreary and awful, as was the childhood of any that grew up in the Edinburgh slums of Old Town. His story was no worse than any other. He grew up in a cramped, two-room flat at the very top of a rotting, rat-infested tenement with six brothers and sisters. Every winter, dozens of people died from outbreaks of typhus or cholera. By the time he was eight, four of his siblings were numbered among them. Dogs and pigs and goats lived in the same dirty straw as their owners. The heat and stink were unbearable at high summer, as were the flies and mites and lice. By the time he was ten, his father had run out or been killed—take your pick—and his sisters were selling flowers and he was selling salt door-to-door from sunup to sundown. And, of course, by that time his mother was whoring, dead drunk most of the time. The flat wasn’t much before, but after that it was a vermin-infested cesspool. What clothes and bedding they had were never washed and the chamber pot was no longer carried downstairs and tipped into the communal midden, it was simply dumped out the window onto whomever was fool enough to be lounging on the walks five stories below.

It was about that time that Clow turned to crime as his sisters turned to prostitution. Yet, disgusted by it all as he was, he didn’t leave until just after his twelfth birthday, when he woke in the dead of night to discover rats eating his baby sister. She’d come down with fever and was fed gin by his mother and by the time the rats set upon the poor child, she was too drunk and diseased to care.

Yes, a lovely childhood, Clow often thought.

Then there were petty crime and workhouses and finally prison and now grave robbing. It seemed a natural progression, and Clow was so desensitized by his grim existence, he didn’t see the error in any of it. Things were as they were. For when you have nothing better to compare it to, even a sewer and a rat’s existence seem acceptable.

Clow laughed under his breath at the folly of his life, then went back to the grave.

He went down, his apron filthy black with mud now. He peeled aside the shroud and uncovered the body. It was a woman. Her eyes were wide and blanched, lips pulled back from white teeth. Rainwater beaded on her discolored, blotchy face. A beetle crawled out of her mouth and Clow flicked it aside. He wrinkled his nose at the rank odor coming off her as he handled her greasy, mucid flesh and slid the ropes under her armpits. Out of the grave, jerking and yanking, Clow and Kierney dragged the body up and laid it in the muddy grass. Diligently, they stripped it of grave clothes and threw those back into the breached casket.

“You’ve been on the sweets, haven’t you, dear?” Clow said to the cadaver. “Bit round in the middle, eh? Now, that’s no way to go through life, darling, and you such a pretty thing, too.”

“Oi, quit trying to get into her skirts and lend a hand here,” Kierney said.

But Clow hesitated. Carefully, he pulled back her graying lips farther to get a good look at her teeth. White and strong. Lovely, is what he was thinking. Dentists were paying ten or eleven shillings for good pearlies. Just a wee bit of work with the pliers and the coins would be in his pocket.

Clow caressed the corpse’s face. “Fear not, duck, I’ll be gentle.”

“You going to kiss her, then?” Kierney wanted to know.

“Aye, did already, and a fine romance we had.”

They wrapped her in a tarp and loaded her into the wagon with the others and filled in the grave, taking care so that it would appear undisturbed come morning. Donning their coats, they climbed up into the buckboard and Clem trotted off into the city.

“It’s a fine night we had,” Kierney said, working the reins.

Clow nodded, shaking water from his lavender hat. “It is. Through grace and providence we’ve had a merry run of it. I feel no guilt at the robbing of the graves. We are fishermen and our hooks and nets have been cast, our bounty hauled in to be shared with all.”

Kierney laughed. “Aye, it is God’s own work we do, I would say. Bless us one and all.”

Off to the city they went, to deliver their stock.

3

It was at the Sign of the Boar, over steak-and-kidney pie washed down the gullet by ale and gin, that Clow and Kierney managed to dry out before the fire. The damp steamed from them in coils of smoke. Bellies filled and pence laid, they began the night’s drinking.

“Oi, fill every flagon in the house with cold gin,” Clow said, holding up his mug before the hearth. “Let them wallow in spirits, one and all.”

A resounding cheer rang up as the barmaids made to fill mug after mug. Clow stood there, his eyes dark and his grin sharp as a guillotine blade, emoting warmth and comradeship… or his version of it. Standing there, high and proud and randy in his double-breasted cobalt frock coat worn to fringe about the sleeves and flaps and smudged with grave soil, he thought himself a lord among men. His John Bull hat was cocked to a rakish angle on his head, the crown steaming, the brim snapped tight.

The Boar was a dirty, greasy place filled with dirty, greasy people. Whores and drunks, beggars and sailors, laborers and thieves. They gathered in clusters, flashing yellow teeth and gripping shiny coins in grubby hands. The air was redolent with woodsmoke, fried fish, and unwashed flesh.

Clow returned to his table and Kierney elbowed a buxom whore out of his way, laughing at her jiggling, bare breasts that were blotched with filthy fingerprints. The table was crowded with the men who harvested the dead—the resurrection men and body-snatchers, grabbers and sack-’em-up men. They were all drinking and whoring and toasting the centerpiece—a human skull.

Clow took it up, put a kiss upon its shiny dome, and hugged it to his breast.

Kierney raised his flagon and pressed his tattered and much-patched Quaker hat to his chest. “I drink a toast before God,” he said, “to the memory of the finest digger this sad world has yet to produce—Stubby McCoy. God bless you, sir.”

Mugs were raised and gin swilled. Pipes and cigar stubs were lit and smoke rose above the resurrectionists in a billowing halo. The skull of Stubby was returned to its place of honor, patted and stroked like an adored family pet. There was silence for a moment or two. Silence broken by fiddle music and the laughter of whores, spilled liquor, and the gagging of tubercular lungs.

A sign above the bar said it all:

DRUNK FOR A PENNY

DEAD DRUNK FOR TWO

A beggar broke into some off-key Irish dirge. A ragpicker vomited upon himself and fell straight over in his chair. Two foundry workers arm-wrestled for the right to bed a fresh, voluptuous prostitute. A sailor fornicated with his whore on the filthy, muddy floor while a group of onlookers placed bets as to the duration of the coupling. And everywhere, everywhere, at the Sign of the Boar, laughter and arguments, people shouting and screaming and begging and crying. Fighting and lovemaking and singing and wagering and dancing. And people, always people. Chimney sweeps with soot-blackened faces. Fishermen reeking of oil. Smithies with callused fingers. Textile workers—piecers, loomers, and scavengers—spending the few pennies they’d earned in fifteen, sixteen hours of degrading, demanding labor. The rich and poor alike drank and whored and sang and spilled their drinks and overturned their plates of fish and sausages to the floor… but nothing went to waste, for pallid-faced children adorned in rags would crawl about on their hands and knees, fighting dogs for the scraps of soda bread, kippers, and shepherd’s pie.

Through this human zoo of smoke, body odor, and cheap cologne, a tall, lanky man made his way. His chin was bristled with white whiskers, his gray hair falling to his shoulders. “Aye,” he said when he’d reached the body-snatcher’s table, helping himself to Clow’s mug, “not many good ones left like Stubby McCoy.”

“Well, if it ain’t Johnny Sherily, and him in the flesh,” Kierney said. “Have a drink with us, Johnny. To the old days and older ways.”

Sherily squeezed in at the bench, dipped into his snuffbox, and inhaled a pinch. “All of us sitting here, then, together. What a lovely sight. And to imagine, our ranks thinning by the month.”

“More for us,” another chimed in.

“Aye, for there’s gold in them boneyards yonder,” Clow said, filling his pipe.

That got a few laughs, but barely a grimace from Sherily. The resurrectionists to a man looked up at him like pups to their mother. “Mayhap, mayhap. Gold, there may be… but something else as well, eh, lads? Something not so shiny nor glittering.”

Clow knew then where this was going, what oft-tread superstitious roads Sherily would take them down. Not even the offer of a fresh round could dissuade those grimy-faced men from hearing what the old gent had to say.

“In the North Burial Grounds, for instance,” Sherily said as if he were chewing on rancid meat. “There’s something there, friends, something one and all should avoid, I would think.”

“Stories,” Kierney said. “Crazy stories spun by old ladies.”

Sherily grunted. “Stories, are they? Yarns, would they be?” He fixed Kierney with those granite-hard eyes of his, impaled him, held him aloft for the others to see. “Tell that to Jib McDonald or Keith Strand or me own poor brother Ronny. Or to any of the other snatchers what disappeared in the North Grounds. And what of Dennis Fahey? Him they found in the morning, clutching a grave marker with cold, dead fingers, his lovely red hair gone white and his heart burst in his chest. And his face? By the saints, all the horror from the dark, crawling corners of this world was bottled up in those staring eyes. Aye… and what cause that, I put to you, Mickey Kierney and Sammy Clow? What cause that?”

Clow puffed off his pipe, smoke billowing from his nostrils. “Well, it not be spook nor wraith nor bogey, you can be sure it is true.”

Sherily looked over those hard, set faces. “The North Grounds are plagued by something and we all know that, don’t we? Who amongst us has not heard them there sounds coming from the moist earth? The rumblings as of a belly or that fleshly pounding as from some subterranean devil’s heart?”

“Rats,” Clow said, sipping his gin.

“Rats, is it?” Sherily laughed at this. “Not rats, me fine young friend, it not be no rats that make them sounds far down below. You’ve all heard them, have you not? In the North Grounds, when you pull up a box… those echoes of something vast far beneath you… the scrapings and stirrings, clawings and slitherings. Rats, you say? My arse it’s rats.”

“It can be nothing but rats,” Clow maintained.

Sherily put those gray eyes on him; they glittered like chips of flint. “Would you tell me my business, Samuel Clow? Is that it? Did I not work the hollows with Burke and Hare in the old merry days? Was I not there when Burke swung? Did I not bring cold cuts to Dr. Knox at Surgeon’s Square? Have I not worked every kirkyard and burial ground from Chirnside to Musselburgh? Aye, I have. That was me, you wee bastard, and I was doing me digging when you were still licking cream from yer mother’s tit. Don’t tell me my business, Samuel Clow, for I know the tombyards and kirks better than the worms.”

“You’ve been sweet on the drink for too many years, Johnny Sherily, and this is a fact, I say,” Clow said to them all. “Ain’t nothing in the North Grounds. Nothing but money a-moldering in the ground.”

But no one seemed to believe him. Most had stopped digging there, rooting out the fresh cadavers. And it had nothing to do with guards or dogs or booby-trapped graves. It was something much worse, something that filled all their bellies with a cold and greasy stew.

“I like me potions much as the next man,” Sherily said, “but no man in his right mind digs in the North Grounds. I won’t go out there no more. No sane man will.” He emptied Clow’s mug. “Aye, for I’ve come as close to what haunts that graveyard as any man, do you hear? And more than once. Many’s the time I’ve opened a fresh box in that damnable place only to find that something had chewed its way in from below and made off with the goods. Weren’t rats did that, now, was it?”

That brought silence, even from Clow and Kierney. There was no explanation of God nor man, Sherily told them in a grim, deep voice. For under the North Burial Grounds there were great passages and tunnels, the barrows of some devil that devoured corpses and polished its teeth on human bone. Some malignant grave-crawler worming in the earth and the North Grounds was its lair.

“Yes, them tunnels below… and before you think I’m filled with a mule’s own shit, dare I mention the name of Arnie McKellan? Old Arnie who was rifling graves when the lot of you were still pissing your knickers?”

That was not a name any wanted mentioned.

McKellan was in the Glasgow Lunatic Asylum and no doubt would be for the remainder of his days. Sherily went over his story once again. How he’d been found one morning in the North Burial Grounds, drooling and gibbering and laughing. Claimed he had opened a grave and as he got his stout hands on the coffin of a recently interred young woman, the box had been pulled from his fingers into a black hole beneath.

“…And Arnie, by Christ, he said he saw something down there, something staring up at him from that hole. Something like a huge, horrible skull with teeth like knitting needles. It stared up at him with burning eyes, crawling and creeping about, chewing on a corpse the whole while.” Sherily drained another mug, shook his head. His hands were shaking and the color had drained from his face. “No, sir, I will not go back to the North Grounds. And may God help you if you do… may the worms feed sweetly upon you…”

4

It was some hours later when the grave robbers made it back to Old Town and its clustered, ramshackle buildings that were home. And then to Clow’s place, weaving and singing and praising God, king, and country, bowing to derelicts, pickpockets, and ladies of the evening along the way… and a goodly number of lampposts as well.

Clow lived in a high, narrow house in a neighborhood of the same. All were sagging and hunched, shrouded by fingers of mist, and packed so tightly together you could leap from one steep-pitched roof to the next and never have to worry about rolling off… for one roof overlapped another and you couldn’t fit a coin between them. A pall of smoke hung over the jagged rooftops in a yellow miasma, the gutters overflowing with waste. All in all, the neighborhood was as seedy and dirty as those who called it home. It might have been deemed squalid by the optimistic, but was in fact a slum that should have been razed fifty, sixty years before. It was near the wharves and perpetually smelled of fish oil and offal.

A few fine gentlemen in high hats and dark coats passed Clow and Kierney, tipping their canes and wrinkling their noses, a boy running out in front of them with a lantern, carefully checking for missing cobbles or potholes they might catch their expensive shoes on.

“A good evening to you, Yer Lordships,” Clow said. “Ruddy bastards.”

The Clow house was a tall, leaning, board-and-batten house you could reach only down a winding, cobbled alley that was cramped and suffocating. Lit only by a few sparse gas lamps, it stank of pig excrement and rotting fish. It was his mother’s house, and she rented rooms to sailors and dockhands. Outside the front door, a grimy signpost said, THE SEVEN KEYS, and below that, DRY ROOMS.

There was a pen filled with grunting pigs out front, happily feeding on rubbish. Their stench, combined with that of the nearby open sewer, made Clow certain he could be nowhere but home.

Each morning he woke, pissed into the chamber pot, and looked out the dirty mullioned window, seeing nothing below but pigs and sewage, much of it walking on two feet. The sunlight never ventured far into his room, which was overrun by greasy shadows and cobwebs. But the view… now, that was special, wasn’t it? The maze of stacked tenements, the dirty, narrow streets running through them, the shadowed alleys and dismal closes and steaming gutters. It was a fine view.

After a bit of drunken fumbling at the latch, Clow and Kierney fell through the door and right to the floor, laughing all the while. The walls were cracked and dripping with moisture, the stink of cod-liver candles and garbage thick in the air. In the dirty parlor by kerosene lamp waited the Widow Clow.

They both offered her courtly bows and she sneered at them. “There you are, you wee squirt of bile,” she said to her son. “Gone all night a-drinking and a-whoring you are, leaving me here to deal with those vermin friends of yours. I canna think of a bigger waste of flesh and space than you, Sammy Clow.”

Irene Clow was known alternately as the Widow Clow or Old Witch Clow. And a crone she certainly resembled. At barely five feet, she weighed in at an easy fifteen stone, a great lolling slug of a woman pressed into a sackcloth dress. Her left eye had been lost in a drunken brawl and she wore a leather patch over it. As things stood, she had one more tooth than eyes.

“And you, Mickey Kierney,” she said, swallowing down her pint, “your mum should have kept her legs crossed rather than retch out a scab like you.”

Her son laughed a high, tittering sound. “Aye, she’s a saucy bit of rash, me dear mum.” He turned to Kierney. “Have you met me dear mother, son?”

“Aye, a fine lady she is—”

“Piss off, the both of you!” she said, slamming one meaty fist to the table. “Next you’ll be wanting to lick me backside on Sunday, you bastards, you dirty, thievin’, corpse-snatching bastards! You’d both rot in hell, if I was to have my say.”

Kierney raised an eyebrow. “If you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Clow, your mother has a wee bit of an evil tongue.”

“That she does.”

“Her language pales me some and sets me withers to trembling… me being a fine upstanding Christian what says his prayers by morn and night and abstains from vice as the vicar says.”

Clow nodded sadly. “Aye, she’s got the Devil’s own hands in her, she does. But a fine, upstanding woman all the same. Many’s the time I’ve seen the Virgin Mother herself in me dear mother,” he said. “Seems she’s a bit long in tooth this night… what could be troubling the old whore?”

“Her piles, me thinks,” Kierney decided. “Giving her a bad turn, they are.”

A glass flew between them and shattered against the doorway. “Fuck you both, you slimy, mud-gupping warts! Out of me house with you, I say! Out, out, out! And down to your cellar with your corpses and dead ones, that’s fine company for the likes of you! Down there in that disgusting smell…”

“Now, Mum, quit holding a candle to the Devil and be of God and grace,” Clow said, tossing a half-pence into her lap. “I’ve brought ye a shiny new mag for your trouble; spend it where you would.”

Kierney crossed himself. “No doubt she’ll be giving it to the poor, Samuel Clow. A fine and pure woman is your mum.”

“Ye rancid prick! Out of me sight with you!” the widow shouted.

“And that voice,” Clow said, “’tis but the gentle coo of a dove…”

Yes, that was Clow’s mother.

She was evil and mean-spirited, but he put up with her… or perhaps she put up with him. He never knew which. As a child, while she fell to whoring and drinking, just about everything was dumped into the lap of Clow and his sisters. It was they who fetched buckets of water from the public well and carried them up five flights of stairs. They what scavenged for firewood, tinder, and lumps of coal. They that hunted among the market stalls with the other grimy street children, searching for a stray turnip or potato that had fallen into a crevice, or perhaps pig ribs or oxtails from the slaughteryards. Anything to make a thin soup with, something to fill their bellies while their mother drank, grunting and puffing in the bedroom with a gentleman caller.

“Good night to ye, me mother,” Clow said, another glass shattering on the wall where his head was a few moments before.

They left her swearing, cursing the day she let Clow’s poor dead father have his filthy way with her and cursing herself for not strangling baby Sammy fresh out of the womb. They went down a set of sweating stone steps and Clow unlocked a heavy plank door and in they went, greeted by a pungent, foul odor of carrion, salts, and drainage.

“Me private sanctum sanctorum, Mickey Kierney. That where I do a good part of me business,” Clow said.

They lit oil lamps and their surroundings swam into view from the murk, the flickering yellow-orange light revealing the gruesome stock the two had laid in. Two long scathed tables were piled with human bones—vertebrae and rib cages, femurs, ulnas, tibias. Shelves along the far wall held a grim collection of undamaged skulls, from adult to infant and everything in between. Here were cadavers of every age and sex packed in sawdust and hay, sunk in wooden casks and barrels of brine. Here were babies pickled in bottles and salted limbs heaped in cupboards. Staring heads had been salted and women injected with preservative. They waited against the walls like mummies and leered from corners with rictus grins. A great assemblage of charnel harvest awaiting the highest bidder, supply and demand. Like the grisly pantry of a cannibal.

“Aye, I look around me workshop and see coins spilling from every recess, I do. Enough here, I say, to give any forty anatomists a hardening and quivering of their private parts. Would you agree, Mickey Kierney?”

“I would,” Kierney said, pulling a lid off a cask and pouring a bit of grain alcohol from a dusty bottle onto the bobbing head of a woman.

“And look here, would you?” Clow said. “Me latest offerings.”

He approached a table with two small forms shrouded in a graying sheet. Carefully, he pulled the sheet back, revealing the cadavers of two four-year-old twin girls, cold as clay, eyes gummed shut, tiny stiff hands pressed over white bosoms.

“Oh, me fine darlings, look at you, look at the wonder of you,” Clow said, pouring himself a tin cup of gin and toasting them. “Your mother decided she would strangle you, did she? Decided life was better without you, eh? Well, no matter, me and Mr. Kierney will whisk you off to the medical college at first light. You’ll be in good hands there, I say. Better than the moss and crawlies of the churchyard, I be thinking.” Clow stroked their sunken faces, brushed a stray strand of hair away from the one on the left and cooed to the other, drawing a finger over her seamed, blackened lips. “Sssh, sssh, me doves, me lovies, me fine little darlings. We’ll have none of that, now, will we? Samuel Clow will take fine care of you, he will.”

Together, Clow and Kierney gently lowered the bodies of the girls into a vat of brine to hold them over until delivery. Their blond curls skated over the surface for a moment, then sank from view.

“Bless ye, me angels,” Clow said, closing the lid of the vat.

Then he sat about with Kierney and the dead, spinning tales and making plans and mapping out the busy weeks ahead. For as long as God was on their side, they decided, there was no end in sight. The doctors wanted the beef and they were the men who could offer them a fine selection for even the most discriminating anatomical palate.

Clow uncorked a fresh bottle of gin and had some trouble doing so, being that he could barely stand by that point. “Oi, have you noticed, Mickey, that there’s a certain unpleasant odor in me digs down here? Might be time to move some of this old stock… beginning to get a bit gamy.”

“That it is.”

The atmosphere down there was moist and steaming. The walls were sweating gray water from the sewers; fungi and mold grew in great spreading patches. The air was vaporous and simmering with a rank dampness and the black stink of decay. Many of the cadavers wore cauls of mildew over their faces. All of which made Clow think about disposing of them in the river. No point in trying to bury them beneath the dirt floor—there were already dozens and dozens of bodies interred there. The month before, Kierney and he had tried to squeeze in a few more, but not four inches down, their spades had penetrated into the spongy, putrescent remains of wormy corpses and the stink had been all but unbearable. And during one particularly hot week just last summer, after burying no less than twenty-five bodies beneath the floor that could not be moved quick enough… said bodies had bloated with gas and begun to rise up out of the dirt. Arms and legs and heads bursting through the soil. An ugly business it had been spearing them with pikes to let out the gas.

In his chair near the shelves, his head framed by rows of shadow-riven skulls grinning and grinning at some secret joke, Kierney said, “And what of this madness with Johnny Sherily? Them things he says give me a bad turn, they do.”

Clow shook his head, seeing four Kierneys. He made to take another sip of gin and spilled the cup, the contents running off the table of bones and onto his crotch. “Madness, is all. He was a fine man, was Johnny Sherily, but he swallows enough to give the Temperance Society the cold fits. Gone soft, me thinks.”

“Could be, could be. But at that North Grounds… I’ve heard them sounds more than once.”

“Rats, is all. Them knows where the good eats is to be had, don’t they? Me uncle Roy once told me he was snatching a fresh one at the Ramshorn boneyard… a clear and fine night it was, says he… and he pulls up the box and beneath? Aye, burrows, rat holes. Little bastards were trying to chew their way in from below. Smart that. Out at the North Grounds? Aye, the same thing—”

“But them sounds…”

“Rats, rats, and rats. And mayhap old Johnny is running a sweet and randy game, I wager. Scaring off them fools at the Sign of the Boar, saving the North Grounds for himself. Be just like that old bastard. Sneaky one, him. Do you think?”

But Kierney, slumped in his chair, was snoring.

“Aye, one day soon, Mr. Kierney, we’ll have pause to do a spot of work at the North Grounds, then we’ll meet Johnny Sherily’s skull-devil. Yes, we’ll show him where the blade falls. Certain we will, oh, yes…”

5

They had a rare run of luck not three days later. Over at the workhouse on the east side of the city no less than fifteen had died in the span of a few days. An outbreak of cholera had done them in, the price to be paid for using and reusing the same contaminated water. Kierney wasn’t taken with the idea of fishing those corpses. To his way of thinking, cholera was an infectious, communicable disease. But Clow assured him that there was nothing to worry on, that cholera died with its owner and such was a medically proven fact. The dead had been placed in a single communal pauper’s grave, so they could make short work of it.

So, in the dead of night, they descended on St. Bartholomew’s Churchyard and got down to work. Limned by thin moonlight, spades sinking into the moist, fresh earth, they went at it. All around them, graves and stones and shadows slinking. The sound of crickets and peepers calling out.

“Least it’s not raining,” Clow said and grunted, tossing black shovelfuls of earth onto the canvas sheet. “Don’t think I could take another night of that creeping damp. Got right inside me, it did.”

“Aye, disgusting, it was. Ground still pissing like a sponge. Heavy, this earth is.”

The city had been flooded and the streets were mud. A mud swimming with the filth of an overcrowded population. Not just water and dirt, but seepage from backed-up sewers, the combined waste of emptied privy pails, offal from the slaughteryards, and polluted runoff from the river. The mud had become a seething organic brew of feces, urine, blood, and contaminated groundwater. A ripe and heady breeding ground for contagious disease. Epidemics of typhus, cholera, and scarlet fever had filled the graveyards. Some were so full that old graves were opened, the disinterred dead and their attendant coffins were burned in huge pyres, nauseating clouds of black stink rising above the city. Hundreds of cadavers were packed into aboveground vaults where they were rotting en masse, the noxious drainage of which was further polluting the soil and ultimately the water drawn from hand pumps. The stench created was hideous, lying over certain dim, dire quarters of the city in a fetid shroud.

This was the city and the times Clow and Kierney moved through. A seething, crowded hell with no conception of sanitation. An age of child labor and epidemics, of rivers congested with sewage and carrion, of streets packed with refuse, the living and quite often the dead. A time when rancid meat was sold openly, as was the flesh of diseased cattle. Medicine was slowly making progress via the anatomists, but the old ways and grim traditions hung heavy. Prescriptions from doctors still called for spiderwebs, human blood, frogs, insects, and very often the excrement of horses and pigs. With the old practitioners, there was a fine line between healing and witchery, superstition and cure.

“Hit something, I have,” Kierney said, withdrawing the blade of his shovel, grimacing in the flickering lamplight. “Oi, and it’s no box, either… it’s, well, let’s have a look, shall we?”

On his hands and knees, Clow holding the lantern close, Kierney began to dig with his fingers, uncovering a shroud and then a pale hand jutting from it. They got to work then until they had uncovered not fifteen bodies, but quite near thirty wrapped up in rotting sheets gone a leaden gray.

“Horrible is what it is,” Clow said, sorting through them. “Not so much as a coffin in the lot. Just wrapped in winding cloths and dumped in like so much waste. That’s life on the spike, friend Mickey.”

Kierney shook his head, dragging a man out by the ankle. “No respect for the dead, that’s what.”

One by one, they towed the bodies over to the wagon until they had a respectable pile heaped like cordwood. A teetering jumble of limbs and heads dangling from scrawny necks. Without further ado, dawn less than an hour away now, they began tossing them up into the wagon, taking care not to damage them, stacking them like bricks. Generally, the fat ones would go on the bottom to support the others, but there were no fat ones from the workhouse, particularly after cholera had run its course.

When they were done, they fit the sheets snug about their cargo, tucking them in like children but without so much as a story, song, or good-night kiss.

“Now, that was a bit of work,” Kierney said. “Might as well be doing honest labor if I have to work like this. Me poor back. Would ye be kind enough to rub it for me, Mr. Clow?”

Clow spit tobacco juice at him. “I would not, Mr. Kierney, nor will I rub anything else that ails ye.”

“You’re a kind man, a kind man. I always say so.”

Kierney was picking soil from under his fingernails with a penknife. His darting eyes were black marbles peering from a sea of fat. “Been doing some thinking on your life, Samuel Clow, and have decided that your problem is a lack of formal education, it is.”

“Aye, it has caused me some concern, I reckon. All I wanted as a wee nip was to be a fine doctor in a fine hansom tooling about the city, tending to the sick and impoverished. Being that I only had three years of proper education, the schools would not have me. And now I’m just a poor, lost soul what robs the graves of them what’s passed over.”

Kierney nodded. “Society has conspired against you.”

“I blame me father, who was a worthless drunk and me mother, that silly fat cow. Me old man used to beat me severely about the ears with his fists and I think he knocked something loose up there, he did.”

“Cor, he only used his fists?”

“Unless a fire poker was near, you see.”

“Me old man was the same way,” Kierney explained. “Used a barrel stave on me, he did. How did you think I got so bloody ugly? Was him, I tell you. The old sod. I used to wake each morning with a stream of his vile piss in me face, except on me birthday, when he’d dump the entire chamber pot on me as a gift. It’s with great love and respect that I remember him.”

“Aye, enough, enough, then, Michael Kierney,” Clow said to him. “If you were to peel an onion beneath me nose, I could cry no more.”

“You’re a kind man, Samuel Clow.”

“Off to Surgeon’s Hall with us. Old Dr. Gray said he’d take this beef soon as we got it. Much scientifical work to be done, ye know.”

“Aye.”

They climbed up in the buckboard and passed beneath the arched cemetery gates, each putting his hat to his bosom as they passed the church proper. The sun was coming up and they had to cross the city in broad daylight now. It was dangerous, but for the money it was worth the threat of the swinging rope. As Clem pushed them farther on, Clow repeated an oft-told tale of his mother, who quite often strangled her lodgers and robbed them.

The city was waking up, laborers and tradesmen in the streets now with their wagons and carts. Miners and cotton-spinners. Whores were trudging home, their skirts muddy and their faces grimy. Stray cats were chasing rats in the alleys and dogs were licking the faces of men sprawled drunkenly on boardwalks. It was a hopeless landscape of row houses, tenements, and industrial decay. Tall smokestacks belching black fumes painted the early morning sky with trails of dark brushwork. Chimneys were chugging out coal smoke that settled over the tall houses and narrow streets in blankets of soot. Everything and everyone was grubby, powdered with ash, slopping through the muddy roads.

In the misting gloom, an old lady dressed in rags hovered over a potato brazier, roasting taters for the workingmen who might want something hot on their way to work. Kierney tipped his hat to her and she glared at him, pulled the corncob pipe from her mouth, and spat.

“A fine lady,” Kierney said.

“An angel, to be sure.”

“Oi, look there, Sammy,” Kierney said, the reins limp in his hands. He gestured toward a group of crows picking at the face of a dead man in the gutter. One of them was working his eye from a bloody socket. “They’re having a spot of breakfast.”

“Making me hungry, it is.”

They were just touching the North Grounds the smell of the slaughteryards filling the air and the muddy streets gone red with runoff, when they caught sight of a police watchman in his long brown coat and tall hat… and he caught sight of them. He waved them to a stop with his lantern, setting it down and coming over, gesturing at them with his stave.

“Here, what’s this business about, I ask you,” he said. “What’s this all about?”

“Evening, governor,” Clow said.

“It’s morning, you fool. What’s this business about?”

Clow tipped his hat. “Business, sir? What business be that? Just two law-abiding common laborers we are going about our work.”

The policeman, a big fellow with a face hard enough to hammer iron on, narrowed his eyes, not liking their looks or their smell. “Enough with your cheeky mouth, you skinny bastard… what’s under that tarp?”

Kierney chewed his lip, looked at Clow, who said, “Bodies, sir. A great heaving pile of cadavers, it is.”

“Cadavers?” He rapped the wagon with his stave. “Grave robbers, are you?”

“Perish the thought, sir,” Kierney said, grinning like a clown, averting his eyes from those of the law.

“If it would please you, sir,” Clow said, “them bodies under there, sir, them be the poor unfortunates what perished at the workhouse not two days ago. A tragedy it was, guv, a tragedy.”

“Hop down, you.”

Clow donned his hat and did as he was told. He joined the law at the bed of the wagon. The law glared at him, heavy muscles bristling under the coat. He looked to be a man who enjoyed violence. He walked around the bed of the wagon, yanking aside the sheets and looking down at all the bodies. They lay cheek to jowl, a collection of staring gray faces, shrunken bodies, and limbs thin as pipe cleaners.

“And where would you be taking this lot?” the law said, prodding about the bodies, looking for signs of violence, no doubt. He stroked his heavy mustache. “It’s a rare hour for this sort of work.”

“Aye, sir, it is,” Clow said. “But it’s the preferred hour, being that folks wouldn’t like the idea of a cadaver wagon rolling down the busy streets. These are bound for the North Burial Grounds, poor souls.”

The law seemed to buy that, but still he looked suspiciously about, examining limbs and necks.

“Aye, if you don’t mind me saying, guv, I wouldn’t be a-handling them there dead ones,” Clow warned him. “For the lot perished of the cholera and I wouldn’t want you to bring a drip of that home to your loved ones.”

The law backed up quickly at the mention of it. He dropped his stave and brushed his hands against his coat. He withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his mouth, for it was a popular belief at the time that disease of all sorts was transmitted by an invisible noxious gas emanating from filth and corpses.

“Cover up them dead ones, you blighter,” Kierney said. “You’re giving the gentleman the horrors, you are.”

“Off with the both of you,” the law said, taking up his stave and jabbing Clow with it. “You both smell of the grave. Off with you and your pestilence, I say.”

“Yes, sir, at once.”

Clow climbed up, took the reins, tipped his hat again.

“Go on, then, you seamy bastard.”

“Yes, sir, and God bless you, sir.”

Off the wagon rolled while the law sought a pump to wash his hands, not realizing he was in more danger from that than from the air he breathed.

“He’s a fine one, that,” Clow said as Old Clem pulled them through the muddy, smelling streets.

“Aye. Reminds me of a toad I once had, looks much like him. The toad was smarter, of course.”

And the wagon rolled on.

6

Long after midnight, the Glasgow High Churchyard was a primeval forest of white marble and gray standing stones, crawling morbid shadows and death angels cobwebbed in mildew. Leaning markers, most worn smooth with age, were crowded in battalions, dripping with fungi and pale moonlight, thrusting at odd angles from the damp earth and rotting vegetation. The trees grew thick and tangled, great black roots jutting from the uneven, moist ground like the arched backs of serpents. A mist that was perfectly white and steaming rose from the earth.

“Lovely place this is you take me, Samuel Clow,” Kierney said. “When I was a nip, we wouldn’t go near here. All them stories… yah… puts the frights to me, it does.”

Clow did not comment on any of it.

He well knew the tales, for he had heard them himself as a boy. The High Churchyard was a macabre pond swum by wraiths and bogeys and shivering, nameless things always looking for boy-meat and girl-meat to pack into their empty bellies. Lost or misguided children, sometimes those on dares, would wade into those black, stillborn waters by the dead of night and disappear without so much as a ripple. Nothing but the scraping of tree limbs overhead and the flutter of bat’s wings to mark their passing.

Least that’s what the stories said.

“Me mother said this was where the witches held their Sabbath, amongst the graves and flooded hollows… do you put much in that, Samuel Clow?” Kierney said, whispering.

“There’s only money waiting to be taken,” Clow told him, not a speck of humor or good cheer in his voice. He urged Old Clem down the winding muddy road, eyes looking for things and he wasn’t even sure what, exactly. “Now hold your tongue, Mickey.”

What they needed was silence here.

The High Churchyard was known to be patrolled by members of the Churchyard Watch Association, armed groups of men who would shoot down grave robbers or stretch their necks on the spot. They hid among the trees and peered from the gun ports of the tall, cylindrical watch houses, long rifles in hand. Clow could see the watch house in the distance. It looked like a turret from a medieval castle. He saw no lights, but that didn’t mean no one was around. The High Churchyard had been a favorite haunt of the body-snatchers right back to the days of Burke and Hare, and it was now, these many years later, still closely guarded. The evidence was everywhere—table-topped graves, iron mort-safes, and stone vaults. Anything to keep the snatchers from fishing out fresh corpses. Graves were sometimes booby-trapped and/or stood sentinel by members of the deceased’s family for a few weeks until the remains were far too corrupted to be of use on the dissection slabs.

But tonight, all seemed quiet.

Old Clem spluttered and shook, did not like where they were, but Clow urged him onward, beneath the latticing of dark branches overhead. The horse moved forward, hooves splashing through puddles, the wagon creaking behind. The ground fog was so perfectly seamless that it looked as if Clem was plodding through a foot of fresh, powdery snow.

The air was damp and chill, yet Clow was sweating. Rivulets of perspiration ran down his face and his breath was sharp in his lungs. Clenching his teeth and he knew not what against, he worked the reins, forever watching among the old tombs and riven slabs, sensing something out there. Not necessarily movement but a gnawing sense that eyes were on them, watching and scrutinizing. He hadn’t felt this nervous since his uncle Roy had taken him along on his first snatching. He tried to shake it… that almost palpable sense of being watched, eyes peering from shadows and clusters of graves… but it was no good.

“What’s bothering ye, Sammy? Christ, but I can feel it over here,” Kierney said in a low, cautious voice.

Clow shook his head. “Not sure, but something don’t feel right.”

“Aye… is it the sense of being watched?”

Clow looked over at him in the darkness. “You, too?”

“Aye, right down into me balls.” Kierney was looking around fearfully now, too. “I’m feeling me mother rolling in her grave, for soon I’ll be joining the dear old cunt.”

In his line of work, Clow had gradually lost all fear of the dead. Superstition was something a corpse-snatcher soon dispensed with or he found another job. But tonight, it had all returned… those boyish fears of dark places and lonely cemeteries, creeping things that reached from shadows.

As he looked around, his skin was literally crawling, his throat tightening down to a pinhole. He could barely breathe. Yes, it was there, out there somewhere, among the sepulchers and tombstones, the very thing that was inspiring this terror in his guts, in his marrow, in deep and forbidding places at the bottom of his soul. At times, the feeling of eyes on him was almost too much. It made him shake and sweat, certain he would scream. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought the dead were rising, misting from their graves, grinning and whispering, waiting to get their teeth into his soft white throat.

Yes, something was out there, but it was not the rising dead.

Not exactly.

Clow kept watching among the netted shadows, the stumps, and crowded headstones, thinking he might catch sight of whoever or whatever was dogging them, but maybe hoping he wouldn’t at all.

Kierney cleared his throat of dust. “I’m thinking there’s no people here, Sammy, but that we’re not alone.”

Clow ignored that. “The vault we seek is just yonder that thicket ahead.”

The narrow dirt road cut through the thicket, which was dim and shadowy even on a bright day, but was positively black and depthless by night. The grotesque shapes of oaks and maples and yews grew to either side, their branches overhanging the road, dense and interwoven. Their trunks were thick, limbs seeming to be growing into one another, coiling roots dislodging ancient graves that appeared to be arranged almost in a geometrical pattern.

Clow saw the vault ahead limned by wan moonlight.

In either direction, hog-backed gravestones, sunken slabs, and leaning crosses climbed hills, fell down into hollows, and were consumed by the wild and knotted undergrowth. Dozens of vaults were set into hillsides or atop the low mounds of ridges, lost beneath crowns of creeping ivy. The vault they wanted was set out among the markers, huge and gray and wreathed in shadow.

Clow pulled Clem to a stop and then Kierney and he just looked around, still feeling like they were being watched or stalked, but not so badly as before. It was almost to the point where they could write it all off as imagination.

Hopping out of the wagon, Clow produced a set of skeleton keys.

“Where did ye get them fine keys, Samuel Clow?”

Clow tried to smile, but it came off badly this night. “The fine family what owns this vault were kind enough to lend them to me, bless them one and all.” He paused. “Or perhaps it were their maid, cheeky thing that one. In a rare moment of depravity, I got the fine girl drunk on rum and bitters, took her to bed, and had me way with her. It was she who got these keys for us. Remember her in yer prayers, old friend.”

“I would at that, Mr. Clow,” Kierney told him. “Taking away the girl’s virtue like that, ah, ye rank bastard. Stealing the fine blossom of her womanhood. Ye should be ashamed, ashamed!”

“I was, certainly I was… that is, until I learned that her blossom had been picked, and more than once, by diverse hands. And here I was, fine upstanding Christian lad that I am, wanting to marry the old haybag, only to learn that her garden was well traversed. Taken advantage of by a cheap woman, I was.”

“Ah, ye poor thing,” Kierney said, clapping him on the shoulder. “What will yer mother be thinking?”

Clow pulled a lantern from the back of the wagon. “She’ll be disappointed, that evil fat sow.”

They moved off side by side through the legions of headstones and funerary crosses. The smiling faces of carved winged seraphs were covered with cauls of lichen. The ground was still marshy from the heavy rains several days previous, the body-snatcher’s hobnailed boots sinking into the mold and rank soil. They leaped over sunken graves that were filled with standing water and floating leaves.

As they rounded a collection of marble-hewn shafts and attendant cinerary urns, Kierney adjusted the canvas sacks thrown over his shoulder and said, “I been thinking I’m not liking these awful places you take me. This may be the last—”

“Quiet,” Clow said, his head cocked to the side.

“What?”

“Quiet, ye great heap!”

Kierney narrowed his eyes, peering around in the darkness. The countless stones around them looked almost luminous, tangled in wisps of ground fog. Through the interlaced tree branches above, the moon was deathly pallid like a waxen face. Kierney swallowed, listened. Yes, he could hear something now, too. Something big moving through the burial yard, underbrush crackling and branches splitting, a sound like some immense serpentine form was sliding among the gravestones.

“Dear Christ,” he said.

Clow held a finger to his lips.

The sounds kept coming but more subtle now, as if whatever it was was not only aware of them but aware it was being listened to.

Kierney was certain it was behind them. Clow thought it was just ahead. It had paused for a moment, but now it was moving again, rustling and slithering. There was a hollow boom as if a tombstone had been knocked over, and not too far away, by the sound of it. Kierney pressed closer to Clow and they both wished there were weapons in their hands. They were both of the mind that whatever in the hell it was, it would show itself at any moment. That it would rise up before them, undulant and loathsome, a towering column of decay, corpse-slime dripping from its jaws in ribbons.

“Don’t move,” Clow said.

But Kierney wasn’t.

He was trembling now, his heart racing, wanting to run but not daring to. The air was cooler, their breath frosting from their lips, as if whatever it was came with the dank chill of subterranean crypts. Where the stink of the burial yard had been moist and darkly sweet before, now it was positively fetid… diseased, even, with the smell of pus from gangrenous wounds.

The thing was still out there.

And by that point, neither Clow nor Kierney was thinking it was anything human or animal. They weren’t sure exactly what, but nothing sane eyes had ever looked upon and lived to tell the tale. Something born from the putrescent ooze of charnel houses and rotting oblong boxes, something with embalming fluid in its veins that had grown fat and repulsive in the darkness like a spider sucking the blood of flies. And by the stink of it, it had surely been chewing on rotting meat and flyblown corpses.

They could still hear it moving.

Not just with that grim sliding locomotion but a skittering sound like dozens of spidery legs scratching over the surface of ruptured slabs. It was almost too much. Kierney and Clow were gripping each other for dear life now, sweating and shaking and frantic with fear. They looked at each other in the dire moonlight, then to all sides, wondering from which direction that blasphemy would show itself.

Kierney made to run, but Clow restrained him.

“But, Sammy,” Kierney breathed. “What now, what now—”

But Clow only gripped him harder, afraid that movement of any kind would bring it to them. It had paused now, and they could hear it breathing out there with a rushing sibilance of air, like wind blown through pipes and hollows and black catacombs. Now and again, it made that leggy, skittering sound and a chitinous scraping like a crab rubbing its claws together.

Clow thought: Yes, what now, Sammy? What in the Christ have you gotten yourself into here? What have you stirred up in this awful place? For you know, don’t you? You know what it is that lurks amongst the old tombs and graves. You know damn well what it is… that haunter of graveyards Johnny Sherily spoke of, that carrion-eater, that Corpse King. It knows you’re here and it wants you to see it, to look upon its face, the face of the eater of the dead, the thing that’s crawled through unhallowed bone pits and mass graves for a thousand centuries, the Lord of the Dead—

Something snapped out there and something else fell.

The thing was moving again, picking its way among crypts and mortuary urns. And then a shrill, hysterical cackling rose up and faded away, sounding like broken glass and rusty grinding metal. It echoed away and then was gone. There was a great noise of things smashed and crushed, vaults splitting open, and then the ground beneath them rumbled like an empty belly and all was still.

After a time, Kierney found his voice: “Was… was that a spirit, Sammy? A spirit of dead things?”

But Clow just shook his head. “No, weren’t that… was that other they talk of, that Corpse King. And now it’s dove back beneath the graves.”

They both listened to see if it would come back, but there was only a distant sound of dripping, the wind exhaling through the high boughs of the trees. Clow had released Kierney now. The lantern had fallen from his fingers at some point and he did not even remember dropping it. He stood there, boots sinking into the swampy ground, white mist ghosting along his ankles. Fear did not come easy to him, but when it did, it was complete. His mouth had gone dry and his throat was full of sand, black noise shrieking through his skull. Reality had dissolved, and his mind with it. He had a mad desire to either scream or begin laughing insanely.

Kierney looked upon him, his eyes stark and unblinking. “I’m thinking we should be going, Sammy. I’m thinking we shouldn’t hesitate.”

Clow clenched his teeth and steeled something in his belly. He bent down and picked up the lantern. “Why for, Mickey? There’s that vault and we might as well help ourselves to what it contains.”

“But Sammy, that thing, that awful thing…”

“Fuck it, I say. I won’t run from it like a wee schoolgirl. Neither will you, old friend. See? That’s what that evil bastard wants… it wants us to be scared.”

“Aye, and it succeeding, I’m thinking.”

Clow sighed. “Go back to the wagon if you like, I’m going in.” He looked over at Old Clem on the road. Fine horse, that. Clem hadn’t liked that thing out there, either. He’d been stomping his hooves and whinnying, but he had not run off like some lesser animal might have. Brave, that one. “Go back and wait with Clem… ye see something what disagrees with you, Mickey Kierney, then tuck yer wee prick between yer legs and ride off and be sure to wipe the dew from yer girly ass on the way.”

“Now, Sammy…”

“Off with you.”

Kierney took off his Quaker hat and slapped it against his leg. “Ye miserable rutting pig! Damn ye! All right, I’ll go with ye, but ye’ll be the death of me yet.”

Clow led on to the vault, which was monolithic and shadow-riven, cut from some water-stained gray stone spread out with cracks. The door was black wrought-iron, rusting badly, carved into rose stems and vines, quite ornate. In the moonlight, trying to wet his lips, Clow produced the skeleton keys and slid one into the lock. It made a grinding, scratching sound and then the tumblers clicked and it was open.

“Easy as that,” he said.

He gripped the edge of the massive door that rose an easy six feet above them and pulled it open. It groaned dryly in the darkness, the sound echoing out below. Right away, a stench of buried things and damp recesses blew out at them. It was a curious mixture of autumn leaves, dead flowers, decay, and mildewing boxes.

Clow lit the lantern. “Stay with me now,” he said.

They stepped into a massive room with a vaulted ceiling that was patched with fungi. Water dripped and things skittered. Clow felt darkness gathering around him, felt everything inside him run like wax. He wanted to cry out, to knock Kierney out of the way and keep running until he was back in the city proper. The oil lamp threw jumping shadows around them. A set of winding stone steps led down into the clammy blackness below.

Clow started down, the steps crumbling away beneath him, crevices packed with moss and clusters of gray greasy toadstools. Beetles scuttled along the walls, dozens and dozens of them, trying to escape the intrusion of light.

“Lovely place, this,” Kierney said. “Damp and smelling and filled with crawly things. Reminds me of me mother’s womb, it does.”

Clow managed to grin at that, but it didn’t last long. This was a bad place, and on a particularly bad night. They were both nervous now, eyeing the shadows carefully like children in an empty house on a dare. The ceiling sloped down overhead, water dripping from it, beetles scurrying. They ducked under webby growths of fungi.

Kierney wrinkled his nose at the stink of age and dissolution. “You sure this is the right place, Sammy? Looks long disused. Maybe your fat little plum was having a lark at your expense.”

“No, this is it.”

The maid that Clow had bedded had told him a tale of woe. The family that employed her had lost their son and his wife in a terrible carriage accident. Their heads were both crushed but bodies untouched. The maid knew this to be true, for she had washed them with the aid of a charwoman. They had been interred only the day before.

“Looks… old,” Kierney said.

“Aye, it is at that. But this be the right one, I’m told. They probably just shoved the coffins down here and got out. This is it, all right, I swear by me mother’s honor.”

“By Christ, we’re in trouble now.”

As they got near the bottom of the steps, they saw two caskets laid out on biers, but they were old, very old. The brass plates and handles badly tarnished, the fir boxes water-spotted and set with fingers of mold. They had been there a long time. A pair of plump rats sat atop them, busily washing their forepaws.

Kierney coughed dust from his throat. “Ach, rats. Just like me mother’s womb, I say.”

Clow held up the lantern so they could see what was beyond. Great motes of dust floated in the yellow, flickering light. The floor was flagstone, the walls gray stone with cobwebby recesses set into them from which black tree roots dangled. This is what they saw at first, but then… destruction.

The vault had been pillaged.

Not just pillaged but ransacked and gutted.

Marble sarcophagi were broken open, lids split into shards, their contents dumped to the floor. Skeletons green with advanced age had actually been crushed to powdery fragments as if some great weight had settled atop them. Caskets had been yanked from their berths in the walls and shattered into kindling. What had been in them was scattered like straw in every direction… yellowed staffs of bones and cloven skulls and rotting cerements. It looked like something had chewed up everything, including the boxes themselves, then vomited it back out in a refuse of charnel debris. And over it all, like a dusting of fresh snow, a gray chalky covering of ash and crematory refuse… the contents of dozens of urns that had been smashed against the dirty, sweating walls.

Something had been here, something monstrous that had forced its way up from beneath, something that had left tangles of black slime behind.

“Christ, Sammy,” Kierney said. “Am I seeing this?”

Clow just shook his head. Yes, they were seeing it, all right, and in Clow’s mind there was only one possible explanation for it, but one that he dared not let slip past his lips.

He panned the lantern about, taking it all in, swallowing it down deep inside himself, where it poisoned him black to the very roots.

A single lidless, untouched coffin was filled with so many busy, scratching rats that you could not see the dusty skeleton beneath. As Clow stepped forward, bringing that light up higher, most of the rats scampered away, making for apertures in the walls. Dozens of burrows they had dug through the reign of centuries.

Yes, it was all terrible. But what was perhaps even worse was that at the rear of the huge chamber there was no floor. The ground had been pushed up from below by some incredible force, dirt and flagstones heaped around a great black maw that led down to fathomless black depths. The rear wall had nearly collapsed. The opening itself looked, if anything, like a very large bomb crater.

And Clow found himself thinking: Aye, but it’s no bomb crater, now, is it, Sammy? This floor was not struck from above but from below. By something immense and powerful that tunneled in here to eat corpses and gnaw on bones and caskets and the like. And you know what that something was, now, don’t you?

He and Kierney carefully made their way to the bottomless black hole that dropped away into the nighted bowels of the earth. The pile of earth and stone around it was higher than a man in places and they had to climb it. And all the while they did, hearing stones and clods of dirt falling to unknown depths, Clow was thinking that from above that hole must have looked like an anthill or the burrow of some subterranean worm.

“I’m thinking we should be going,” Kierney said.

But Clow had to see.

Something in him demanded it and would be satisfied with nothing less. He got up near the top and held the lantern over the hole. There was a rush of hot, putrid air from far below. The light reached down twenty feet, maybe. The walls of the passage were perfectly circular, rough-hewn, but circular. Kierney tossed a stone down there and heard it splash maybe ten seconds later.

The lantern shook in Clow’s hand, the handle greasy beneath his fingers. A dreamy, absent sort of terror flooded through him. He had an image of that wall of dirt and stone suddenly letting go and the both of them plummeting to what waited below. For it was there… he could smell it, something feverish and fleshy that stank of putrefaction.

Yes, it’s there, all right, Sammy, and it’s watching the both of you right now.

And it was bizarre and inexplicable, but there was a magnetism to what waited below. It wanted them to look upon it and they could not help themselves. They could feel its pull, its malevolent seduction, and it was all they could do not to give in to it, not to jump down there with it like it wanted them to.

Then the tunnel roared with a peal of hysterical, screeching laughter and they both sensed movement down there, something rising. Kierney slid down the pile of dirt and Clow was right behind him. He took one last look and saw two leering red eyes the size of grapefruits coming up toward him.

He let out a short, guttural scream and tossed the lantern down into the passage, and then he and Kierney were leaping over the heaped debris of the vault, fighting to get up the steps while the ground beneath them rumbled and shook. They could feel the beast behind them, rising up with a roaring, rushing sound, pushing a wave of hot corpse-gas before it.

And then they were out in the graveyard, running and running, not daring to speak. Clem was mad with panic by the time they mounted the wagon. And when Clow gave him a taste of the whip, he rocketed them away, an entire field of tombstones behind them collapsing into a pit as something tunneled in their direction.

But then they were through the gates.

And behind them, that hysterical laughter echoed out into the night.

7

After that night in the High Churchyard, it was no easy bit coming to terms with what gnawed and slithered below. It took many days of fierce drinking to wash the taste of that horror out of their mouths, and even then, it was in their minds and sensed in every dark corner or wash of shadow… that unseen, mocking presence that was waiting for them, ever patient and malign, knowing it would have them one night as they dug and if not then, when they themselves were planted in the harvest fields of the dead.

Ultimately, it would own them.

For, as was said, in the end the worm conquered all.

And for Samuel Clow, the world lost its brightness forever. His world was not exactly a brightly lit place and never had been. He grew up in abject poverty, suckled by violence and ignorance, as had all his people. But that world that had been uniformly gray before with few swaths of color to be had was now even darker. It was cursed and forbidding. The sunniest days were lathed with shadows and the suggestion of creeping things in dark, shunned places.

Some nights he was certain he could hear the thud of some immense heart buried in the earth, and on others he woke shivering and sweating, certain that malignancy had come for him at last. He would wake, tasting something like rotting meat in his mouth and smelling the graveyard stench of the thing, and would be certain that it had been hanging over him as he slept, breathing its corpse breath in his face. In his dreams, he would hear its deranged laughter echoing down the narrow streets, from sewers and gutters and drainage ditches.

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.

8

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.

“I think I’d rather languish in the Salt Box at Newgate Prison wearing the Devil’s Claws than to be married to that tree,” Kierney said.

The crowd was pressing in, more coming all the time. Leaky Baker was already in attendance. He’d been whipped through the streets from the Tolbooth in the High Street and was surrounded by a police watch so the drunken mob didn’t get their hands on him.

Already there had been outbreaks of violence… people beaten and trampled, several women assaulted, and a couple tradesmen stabbed during arguments. But it was no surprise, for executions were wild and woolly affairs, street carnivals where tin pails of whiskey punch and ale made the rounds. Vendors sold baked potatoes, roasted pork sandwiches, and fried fish. Here were respectable moneyed ladies in hoop skirts and gentlemen in high hats rubbing shoulders with beggars and sweepers. Boot-blackers and mud-larkers stood shoulder to shoulder with sailors and whores and black-faced chimney sweeps. Pickpockets and gamblers worked the crowds, prostitutes flashing their wares and street children crawling about on their hands and knees, stealing anything that was dropped.

Near to Clow and Kierney, a rowdy gang of coal-heavers was passing bottles of rum, leaning up against one another so they wouldn’t fall on their faces. They cursed and pissed themselves, kicked dogs, and insulted passing ladies, having a high time of it all around. But mostly they sang the same tune again and again:

“Up the close and down the stair,

But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare,

Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,

Knox the boy that buys the beef.”

It had been a popular tune ever since William Burke swung at the Grassmarket, and each time a grave robber was put to the rope, the little ditty surged in popularity. The song was passed through the crowd, sung loud by dirty, grinning mouths.

It was a morning of wild, raucous splendor for all in attendance and much money was changed hands, lost, and stolen. Men passed out. Dogs were kicked to death. Children crushed by the mob. And more than one woman was with child when it was all over with. Entertainment was always lacking in the industrial ghettos of Edinburgh, and a good hanging was always better than bull-baiting, cockfights, or the usual bare-fisted brawls.

“Listen to that song, would ye?” Clow said. “I’m thinking these fine folk and sweet-stepping gentry have a lack of respect for our chosen profession, Mickey.”

“It would seem so, Sammy. It would seem so.” Kierney stuck a plug of tobacco in his mouth and spit brown juice into the eyes of a growling mongrel. “But the hour grows near and soon Leaky Baker, fine man that he was, will be no more.”

“A shame it is, a shame.”

Clow shook his head. “And don’t ye be believing those filthy lies told of poor Leaky. Why, just the other day the boys were saying how Leaky kidnapped that trio of dwarf children from the circus and Burked them in a lonely warehouse, putting his hand over their small mouths and pinching their noses shut.”

“They said that? Why, the bastards!”

“Aye, they did. Burked the three of ’em, they said, and stuffed them in flour sacks, selling their earthly remains to the anatomists at Surgeon’s Hall. But Leaky was a fine, fine man and he wouldn’t have done such. I’m sure the little angels went to their god by natural causes.”

“Certainly,” Kierney said. “Leaky a common murderer? Ah, is rubbish, it is.”

“Must be. For I swear by me mother’s virtue that Leaky Baker was a fine, upstanding Christian and the church poor box will be sadly lacking without the likes of him.”

“Charitable and tireless was he.”

Clow packed his pipe and eyed the crowd. “Why, I recall the favor Leaky did me when I was but a lad of sixteen and two. Worked me ass off in the mills all week for a few dirty shillings, and Leaky and his Christian friends beat me down and took me money. Ah, I near starved! Not a scrap of food I had for nigh on a week… but it was a fine and worthy thing he did for me. Otherwise, I would have spent that money on drink and debauchery, as my kind always do.”

Kierney wiped his eyes. “Aye, these are true tears I cry for such a story. God bless him for saving you from yerself. What a fine man, a fine man. Why, it brings to mind another tale of Leaky’s kindness and god-fearing ways. This one will squeeze yer heart dry, I say. But you surely remember when he raped his own daughter?”

“A fine act that was, may God bless and keep him for that,” Clow said. “For Leaky did it out of the goodness of his heart.”

“He did at that. Why, it was for the girl’s own good that he took her the way he did. After that, why, the child would know rape when she saw it.”

“Aye, it saddens me, these heartwarming tales. There is no depth to a father’s love. And to think they’re going to hang that fine, randy bastard… why, it’s a sin.”

“A Christian martyr, he is.”

A drunken man came staggering over to them, elbowing sailors and cartmen out of the way. He wore a ragged frock coat decorated with vomit down the lapel. His breath stank of the dried fish he’d been chewing. “Are ye two drunk? For ye must be to talk of that gamy bastard Leaky Baker in such a manner. He weren’t nothing but a fucking shit in search of a hole.”

The man was Ian Slade, a snatcher both men had long known. The sleeves of his dirty coat were speckled with fish scales, the result of stuffing corpses into herring barrels for easy transport, as was his way.

“Aye, a fine man he was, Ian,” Clow said.

“Yer drunk? Yer both fucking drunk!”

Kierney spit tobacco juice at his feet. “Aye, drunk we are, Ian Slade. And hungry.” He was studying the vomit down the front of Slade’s coat and the various undigested bits in it. “Is that fried scupper I see there, Ian? Oh, but it makes me belly hollow, just the smell of it.”

Slade grimaced. “Cheeky, smart prick, ain’t ye?”

He made to jump on Kierney, but Clow slid a knife from the sleeve of his coat and pressed the blade to Slade’s round belly. Held it there, so it could get a smell of the meat it would soon carve.

“Off with you, Ian, let us remember our friend in our way,” Clow said.

Slade eyed Clow like he wanted to tear his throat out and take his time about it. But then he smiled and backed away. “Good day to ye, Samuel Clow.”

Then he was gone, melting into the ground, drowning in that sea of dirty, drunken humanity.

“Wee bit of a nasty temper to that one,” Clow said.

“ ’Tis a shame, a shame.”

A hush fell through the crowds as the clock of St. Giles tolled the death knell of eight, the appointed time for Leaky Baker to meet his maker. A scaffold had been erected at the gallows tree, some twelve feet up in the air, a double ladder placed against it. Williams, the hangman, led Baker up the steps. Baker did not hesitate nor tremble visibly. He climbed the steps with a great calm and concentration. When he was in place—standing there in his bloody shirt, staring out over the crowd with his beady rodent’s eyes—he managed a thin little smile. He worked up a juicy ball of phlegm and spit it out at those that had gathered, right over the shoulder of the police watch that encircled the scaffold. Immediately the crowd came to life, swearing and cursing and shouting.

“BURKE HIM!” someone cried. “BURKE THAT CORPSE-THIEVING MURDERING BASTARD!”

“AYE, BURKE THE BASTARD! GIVE ’EM WHAT HE GAVE THEM OTHERS, LYING, FILTHY FUCK!”

The police visibly tensed. They were all that stood between Baker and a particularly gruesome episode of vigilante justice. They had their clubs at the ready. But had the crowd decided to storm the gallows, they would have been swallowed alive in seconds, trampled underfoot and mashed to pulp in the grass. More police pressed in on horseback, calling out for the crowd to settle down or they’d be turned away.

Leaky Baker was enjoying it.

He’d been a predator all his life, gaining his greatest thrills from the pain and discomfort of others, and here he was with an amassed flock gathered, one he could toy with and humiliate and anger. And he loved it. Loved the crowd he worked with his bare hands, that sea of faces that had come for him and him alone.

“I’ve sold the corpses of yer mothers and sisters and fat fetching daughters to the surgeon’s knife!” he called out at them. “And what a merry lark it was! So much beef were them whores! I pissed on their graves out of respect, just as I piss on the lot of you buggering cocksuckers!”

You could almost hear something snap out in the crowd. Like maybe some restraint of self-control, and civilization had finally reached the breaking point and burst, setting free the bloody-hungering beast within. Eyes were wide and hating; mouths scowling, teeth gnashing, drool wiped from lips with grubby fists. From the high buildings opposite, people screamed from windows, a few nearly falling out from four and five stories up. The guards up on the scaffold stepped back momentarily, feeling the raw and smoldering rage of the crowd like a wind blown from a smelting oven. Then, wiping sweat from their faces and maybe thinking of their meaningless and violent deaths at the hands of the crowd, they took hold of Baker. But he was a pleasant sort right to the end. Although his hands were tied behind his back, his legs were free and he kicked one of the watchmen. The other locked an arm around his throat while the hangman slipped the white hood over his head. Through it all, the attendant minister, pale as flour now, kept reading verses from the Book of Common Prayer… though you could hardly hear him over the bellowing crowd.

A woman atop a man’s square shoulders tossed her greasy hair back and pulled from a bottle of gin. “HEY, GRAVE ROBBER! WE’RE GOING TO TAN YOUR HIDE AND CUT YOUR BALLS OFF!”

“AYE,” said a man in front. “YANK OUT HIS BOWELS AND FEED HIS STOMACH TO THE RATS, I SAY!”

“BURN HIM! BURN THE FOOKING BASTARD!”

Clow was not caring for this much. He could smell the sour, boozy stink of the crowd, and it was an acrid odor like something black and vile simmering away in a witch’s cauldron. If they didn’t hang Baker and soon, those gathered would not be able to hold themselves back. And what scared him most was at that moment when everything in the Grassmarket was balanced precariously in a deadly neutrality, it wouldn’t have taken much to incite the mob. A single finger pointing and the cried accusation of grave robber would bring death. There were plenty of snatchers in the crowd and plenty of people who knew who they were. A simple accusation and both he and Kierney would be dismembered, disemboweled, and strung up for a public stoning or burning.

The police on watch were looking very frightened.

You could feel the electricity surging through the crowd, arcing from body to body to body in an unbroken circuit, amping up and revving itself to full bore. An awful hot stink wafted from them.

Something was about to happen.

The crowd, still shouting and screaming and crying out for blood, began to inch toward the scaffold. They were a single thrumming machine of intolerance. A machine with a million legs and a million scratching fingers, a million bunching muscles and chattering teeth and fixed eyes, all lorded over by a single insane mind. The machine would not back down. It was roaring, gone kinetic with a burning stink now that critical mass had been reached. Gears were grinding and wheels spinning, sparks flying and smoke rising. Nothing could stand in the way of the machine. It would crush any and all…

And at the last possible moment, the order was given by the sergeant of the guard, and the trap was sprung beneath Leaky Baker. His body jerked and his neck snapped with the sound of a dry twig. His legs kicked for a moment or two and that was it. He swung from side to side, slowly revolving.

You could hear the almost orgasmic cry of the crowd. Death hunger and death lust had been satisfied, and they relaxed, sighed with the sound of a thousand balloons deflating. They began to shrink and pull away from one another, no longer wanting the press of sweaty flesh against their own. A few groups still raged for more, but most began to break away, looking almost embarrassed.

The police knew how to deal with the scattered bands of rowdies and they began to corral them in on horseback. Clow and Kierney were nearly exhausted by it all themselves and they leaned against each other.

“That was a bit of a scrape,” Clow said.

“Aye, for just the one moment there, I saw the angelic face of me whoring mother welcoming me beyond the pearly gates.” Kierney sighed. “Is not an experience I’ll be wanting again soon.”

As the police kept the unruly elements at bay and the others began fading away to the drab hopelessness of their crowded, close lives, the body of Leaky Baker was cut down. After the attendant police surgeon was satisfied that his neck was quite broken and his life was quite gone, the body was dragged from the scaffold and dumped into an enclosed mortuary wagon. From there it would be brought to Surgeon’s Hall for dissection by the anatomists.

Kierney took off his hat and pressed it to his chest. “And so we bid ye a fond and final farewell, Leaky… ye ripe, thievin’ fuck.”

Clow grinned. “Aye, to the silence and worms and sighing vaults, Leaky, ye great bloody gob.”

9

That evening, as a light mist dappled the cobblestones and pushed a chill into the air, Clow and Kierney pulled their dog cart up a steep street, nodding to those they passed. They turned onto Infirmary Street, sighting the hospital and tree-lined Surgeon’s Square just beyond. It lay out of reach of those dirty, rotting streets and was like a world unto itself. The buildings were tall and clean, set with carvings and high windows. No beggars and trash and filth to be found here. The gaslights flickered evenly. Boys meticulously swept the cobbles free of dirt. Over to the right was Surgeon’s Hall and to the left was a tall, narrow building with hooded windows.

Dr. Gray’s anatomy school.

A couple of regal, elegantly dressed men passed Clow and Kierney, snapping open umbrellas and ignoring the men entirely.

Kierney looked over his shoulder at the clock on the steeple down the hill. “Oi, we’re late,” he said.

“Off with us, then,” Clow said.

They pushed the cart over to the rear entrance of the anatomy school, a wind kicking up now and spraying rain in their faces. It was an ugly night, but they’d worked worse. Dr. Gray had need of the complete skeletons of a boy and girl both under ten years of age, and Clow was only too happy to oblige. He had the both of them in stock, just a bit of washing and dusting and those bones were shiny and proper-looking.

They knocked on the door and it was answered by Gray almost immediately. He was tall and stern, with piercing eyes like needles. Dressed in a surgical apron dark with old stains, he motioned them in.

“And be quick about it,” he said.

They brought their crates down the stairs and set them atop a scathed wooden table. Anxiously, Gray opened them and examined the bones within. He studied scapulas and tibias, baskets of rib cage and pelvic girdles with an appraising, expert eye.

“Hmm,” he said. “Interesting… interesting.”

“To your liking, guv?” Kierney said.

“We shall see, we shall see,” Gray said, examining the vertebral columns with a magnifying glass.

Kierney looked at Clow and he smiled. Good old Dr. Gray. A fine enough man in his own way, but a bit fussy, a bit overbearing. But he was no fancy high-hat, and they both knew it. Though he exuded culture, intelligence, and sophistication, they both knew he’d been born in the slums of Glasgow, working himself out step-by-step and putting himself through medical school. Now he was a surgeon and anatomist of no little skill. But when they were with him sometimes, they could still see it in his eyes… that predatory gleam that bespoke humble, lean beginnings. He was a gentleman now, to be sure, but there was something stark and subtly evil about him that told you flat out you did not ever wish to cross him.

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.

10

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.

In the pubs and gin houses, when candles burned low and the snatchers were deep in their cups, they would tell lurid stories of things seen in midnight graveyards, of grave robbers who disinterred corpses not for profit but for pleasure and dark ritual. There was old Peter Crybbe, who unearthed cadavers and made furniture and clothing from their skin and bones and who wasn’t above lunching on a fresh and tasty morsel. There was Dr. Leith, who paid well for not only bones and bodies but for tissues and limbs and organs that he used in his experiments. The story went that his tall, leaning house was a veritable mortuary of body parts, many resurrected by diabolical methods… awful, pale things swimming in jars of serum and alcohol that moved of their own accord.

This was also the age of chemical galvanism, when doctors and scientists tried to resurrect the dead via electric shock and chemical apparatus. Though much of their work wasn’t far removed from that of the alchemists, some of it was actually successful. George Foster, who was executed for the murder of his wife and child, was reanimated briefly by surgeons who watched in horror as he sat up on the slab, trembled, then screamed before collapsing into death once again. One of those present died of fright. A murderer named Clydesdale was animated briefly in Glasgow after being attached to a Voltaic pile… he contorted and shuddered, looked around, and then died a second time. Electricity was used successfully to bring back drowning victims and those without undue physical trauma. In Germany, the body of a notorious criminal was noticed to be supple and warm some hours after its hanging in the public square. The surgeons present believed they could revive him with sufficient attention… but given that the man was a convicted murderer, it was decided that he should stay dead. So without further ado he was dissected.

At the time Samuel Clow and Mickey Kierney practiced their ghastly art, tales of horrors met in graveyards were at an all-time high. Diggers were disappearing and nobody exactly knew why. As the ranks of the resurrectionists thinned, the more practical-minded said that many of them had simply quit the business because of the increased pressure by the Churchyard Watch or had been captured and killed by mourners. Very pat, very rational… yet it did not explain the diggers that were found mad or mutilated in kirkyards come morning, and it sure as hell did not explain how it was that portions of ancient graveyards had collapsed as if from the cave-in of some underground network. City officials claimed it was merely subsurface subsidence, but the diggers themselves knew better. Long had they been whispering about something that tunneled beneath the burial grounds, something that fed on noisome corpses and sharpened its teeth on bones. Many had seen it, and very few of them came out of the experience with their minds intact.

Samuel Clow and Mickey Kierney had not seen it, but they had heard it and smelled it and felt its nefarious presence with some sensory network that was much, much older than man’s five known senses. And in their hearts, they believed. Maybe they wouldn’t admit as such out loud and maybe they were the first to deride others about the Corpse King, but they believed, all right. One rainy night at the Hogshead Inn over jugged hare and capers, Johnny Sherily downed a pint and wiped foam from his white beard, slammed his tin cup on the table. “Ye say I shouldn’t retire, boys? Ye say I should a-keep digging and carting the meat to Surgeon’s Hall? Well, yer wrong, the lot of you. The trade I practiced with Willy Burke afore he got randy is not safe no more.”

“Aye, yer getting old is what,” Kierney said.

“Age, ye say?” Sherily laughed, but there was no humor in his voice. “Listen, ye wee boil, I’m twice the man you are and I’ll not see sixty again. I can open a grave in half the time it takes ye and fish out what’s inside with me bare hands. These same hands what could break yer fool skull open… do ye doubt that, Mickey Kierney?”

“Not at all, Johnny. Ye always were a violent sort.”

“Ah, you and that pissing mouth, Mickey.” Sherily paused, eyeing Kierney with anger but also with pity. “Listen to me, all of ye. For what crawls below is not just out at the North Grounds no longer, it’s everywhere, a-digging and a-chewing.”

“I’ll not listen to such rot,” Clow said. “Crazy, is what it is.”

Sherily sighed. “No matter, Sammy, no matter. For I see it in yer eyes. Ye know more than ye say regardless of yer glib tongue. I will not go out to them boneyards by night, not again. They can say all they want about subsidence, but it’s all shit and shaddock. For the earth what collapses in them graveyards heresabouts does so in a winding pattern as of passages below… passages tunneled by something a-long and a-slithering. And do ye need me to tell ye what that something is, Sammy? Do ye need me to put a name to what creeps and feeds?”

11

The weeks following Leaky Baker’s hanging were busy ones for Clow and Kierney. They jumped back into the business with a vengeance. They didn’t discuss the Corpse King or anything they couldn’t explain to their own satisfaction; they just did what they did best. They managed to move a lot of their stock and much more had to be dumped into the Union Canal. But even with that, the cellar still held no less than two dozen corpses, in part and in whole. And that didn’t take in the bones or what was in the casks and barrels.

They were a busy duo, peddling their wares and selling the raw materials of the grave. Always plenty of doctors needing fresh specimens for their teaching and private research. In a city where almost ninety-five percent of the population lived well below the poverty level, Clow and Kierney were living like lords. Night after night was a gluttony of liquor and whores.

But not all of it was good.

People were tiring of the gruesome tales of rifled graves and stolen bodies, and the Churchyard Watch had been strengthened, guarding over graves until the interred were far too corrupt to be of use to anyone. Clow and Kierney ran afoul of them several times, escaping under a volley of rifle balls more than once. But they had special orders and those orders had to be filled. On more than one occasion, they had to “walk” the corpses through busy streets. Using specially designed manacles shackled to their ankles and those of a corpse, they would walk a cadaver between them, holding it up like a drunk, moving its feet as they moved their own. To any who noticed, they were just two men walking a drunk home.

So after a particularly successful week, the bad thing happened.

12

Up until the time of Leaky Baker’s execution, neither Clow nor Kierney had ever Burked a soul. They dealt with the dead and had no interest in producing corpses. And it was not that either man was above murder, for the times were dark and desperate indeed, but such things were to be avoided at all costs. For them, the graves would supply what was needed; they would not stoop to becoming another Burke and Hare. They were resurrectionists, not killers, and they took a certain pride in the fact. Though, truth be told, people were so very incensed by the activities of corpse-snatching that they saw little difference between Burkers and diggers—all were to be dealt with in the same way: at the end of a rope.

No, up until the time of Leaky Baker’s execution, Burking was not something either man gave serious thought to.

And then came the night at Greyfriars Churchyard.

It wasn’t until well after midnight when they entered the high black iron gates. The Churchyard Watch was about, so they took special pains. They were both armed with navy flintlock pistols and left Clem and the wagon at home, pulling a dog cart behind them, the axles of which had been carefully greased so as to make no sounds. Quietly, then, they moved among the moss-green trees, headstones, and tabletop slabs, some of which had been there for centuries. The air was moist, threatening rain, and a gray mist hung in the air.

They paused for a moment alongside the high brick walls of the Covenanter’s Prison, that ugly drab structure in the High Kirk that had once housed the Covenanters, the seventeenth-century Scottish Presbyterians who were persecuted by Charles II. December 7, 1666, they were hauled out of Haddock’s Hole, as they called the prison, and found guilty to a man. They were all sentenced to be hanged on the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh. As many as ten at a time had their necks stretched on a single scaffold. Afterward, they were dismembered, the individual pieces of their anatomy put on public display in the Covenanters’ own localities as a warning.

Nearby was the high, oval tomb of Sir George Mackenzie, the crown prosecutor against the Covenanters, who called him “Bloody Mackenzie.” Locally, the tomb was known as the Black Mausoleum and was reputed to be haunted, much as the prison itself.

Standing there in the shadows, Clow whispered, “Just wait a moment while I get me bearings. Have a chat with old Bloody George if ye wish.”

“No, I don’t speak with ghosts,” Kierney said. “Especially titled ones, they won’t give me the time of day… not that I blame them.”

“Nor I.”

Kierney pulled his hat off and wiped sweat from his brow. “Them poor Covenanters… me mother was a Presbyterian, I’m thinking.”

“Was she? I thought she was a whore.”

“Aye, she was, and a fine and sassy one at that. Prostitute… Presbyterian… I thought they was the same thing. Me poor education, I guess.”

“Enough with that now,” Clow said. “There were Presbyterians on me father’s side, I believe.”

“And fine ones they were.”

“Certainly. Highwaymen, the lot of ’em. Slitting gobs and stealing purses… God bless them one and all.”

After a moment they were off, following winding lanes and cutting among fifteenth-century fieldstone markers, riven tombs, and lichen-encrusted statuary: winged angels, sleeping lambs, and grinning skeletons wrapped in winding cloths. Tombstones were carved with raised cherubs, skulls-and-crossbones, and death angels gripping human skulls. The moon was thin-edged, the sky black with boiling clouds above.

Clow in the lead, Kierney following with the dog cart, they were in search of a fresh grave that belonged to a middle-aged woman who had passed just yesterday of a heart ailment. She had been very healthy up until then, the undertaker informed Clow for a few pence, and Dr. Gray would pay well, as he was currently researching cardiovascular diseases, especially those of a congenital nature that might, he thought, pass down family lines.

They kept moving, Clow only having the most general idea of where the grave was located. But he would find it, Kierney knew, and would keep casting about until he did so. It was his way. Like a bloodhound, Clow had an especially sensitive nose and he could smell fresh grave earth for a hundred yards.

Kierney looked behind them, always vigilant for the Churchyard Watch and maybe other things, too. He could see the squat and rising mural monuments at the edge of the churchyard flanked by the high flagstone buildings of Candlemaker Row. The tall chimneys and jagged roof peaks scratched against the clouds above. All the multipaned windows reflected bits of moonlight, but were all dark within.

“Quit lazying about,” Clow told him, “and bring that cart along.”

Clow had found the grave now, situated just beyond a wilted hedgerow in the shadow thrown by two crumbling sixteenth-century crypts. All the graves here were quite old, but there had been one plot of earth overlooked and perhaps the family thought their loved one would be unmolested in such a spot. As it was, the shiny new limestone slab stood out among the others, which were leaning and cracked and nearly unreadable with fingers of moss.

It was unguarded, as they had been told.

Down on his hands and knees, Clow expertly felt around the grave for tripwires that might lead to bombs or pistol harnesses or other booby traps. Such protective measures had cost the lives of dozens of unwary diggers. But the grave was clean.

“Quick about it, then,” Clow said.

Kierney drew up the dog cart and arranged what they would need. They unfolded a large tarp painted black and set it over wooden poles atop the grave. This lean-to would shelter them and the light of their lantern. He brought their tools inside and lit the hooded whale-oil lantern. Using prybars also of wood—the noise of iron against stone tended to carry—they edged the slab away from the grave. It was heavy, very heavy, but it was only a matter of leverage, experience had taught them. The only sound was their grunting and the slab grinding against the stone flange it was set on.

But soon it was clear.

The coffin was down only a few feet. Clay and stones had been arranged above to discourage resurrectionists, but they got through it all right, piling the dirt on a canvas sheet. They cleared it away in about ten minutes and broomed away the residue. Using screwdrivers, they unscrewed the lid, taking great pains to pocket each screw so it could be put back in later.

As Kierney was working the screws, a funny feeling began to come over him. It was not the stink of dank earth or buried things but an almost inexplicable sense that they were being watched. He couldn’t seem to shake it.

“Thought I heard something,” he told Clow, slipping from the tent with his pistol and studying the funerary grounds.

Nothing moved out there.

Nothing stirred.

Not even a leaf rustled.

There were lots of statues at Greyfriar’s, and seeing them gathered out there among the crowded tombstones draped with moonlight often gave the uninitiated a bit of a bad turn. But Kierney was seasoned. His eyes could immediately distinguish between inanimate forms and those only pretending to be so.

Nothing.

He knew instinctually that there was no one about. They were alone, and if the Watch was about, then they were far away. Though the air was damp and chill, he was sweating profusely once he entered the flaps of the lean-to again. Clow was taking out the last few screws.

“Ye playing with yer prick out there?”

“Aye, that I was,” Kierney said. “But it wouldn’t pay no mind to me hand, it prefers yours, and so it should.”

Clow laughed in his throat.

Kierney was sweating very badly now. Outside, the feeling of being watched had all but shrank away, but in here… Christ, it was all over him, practically screaming in his ears.

“Ye all right, Mick?”

“Aye, just getting the spooks for no good reason.”

“Well, quit yer fantasies about me poor Christian mother already. That’s what scaring ye. Me father near dropped dead of fright when she opened her legs to him. God as my witness, but there are certain horrors men were not meant to look upon.”

Kierney feigned a laugh,but could not shake the awful feeling that they were not alone. That there was another with them… unseen and unknown but close enough to touch.

Clow popped the last screw and put it and the screwdriver in the pocket of his frock coat. He worked his fingers under the lid of the box and pulled it up and up.

Kierney could barely breathe.

There was no smell of putrefaction or gas. Nothing. Just a dry smell of graveclothes and an after-odor of perfume. Nothing more.

The woman’s eyes were open.

There was a faint grayish pallor to her skin, but other than that she hardly looked touched by death. There was a vitality here that was strong and healthy, the cheeks just touched by pink. Her face did not have that compressed, sagging look that came with death. Her eyes were bright, not sunken in the least or filmed over.

“She’s not dead,” Kierney heard himself say.

“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.

13

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.

Clow stepped into the room, seeing his obese mother on her feet, swollen ankles, goiter, and all, stumbling about and trying to stab Kierney, who was laughing and merrily dancing away from her.

“All right, knock it the fuck off,” he said.

They both stopped.

Swearing, the Widow Clow sank back into her chair with a thud that shook the table. Kierney acted like he could barely keep on his feet in the aftershock. “Like some great whale has dropped from the sky,” he said.

The Widow Clow snarled and threw the knife at him. It missed him but stuck right into the rotting woodwork, the handle quivering.

“Now, why ye got to go and get me mother all worked up,” Clow said, smiling. “Leave the fine, fat, murdering whore to her own devices.”

The widow scowled at her son. But with only two blackened teeth left in her gums, the effect was almost comical. “Ye randy shit, I shoulda drowned ye when I had the chance! Filthy grave-robbing scum! I gave me life for you! I ruined me mind and ruined me body trying to raise ye proper and this be me thanks! Turning me fine house into a graveyard! Me cellar into a morgue! And who washes them bodies ye fish from them dank holes, eh? I do! I wash away the grave dirt and worms, and this is how ye treat me, ye dirty buggering filth! I curse the day I lay with yer father! I curse the day I squeezed ye out! Had half a mind, I’d bring the police in here! Let ’em hang ye, I would!”

Clow was not smiling now.

Something dark and unforgiving had settled over his face. He stepped over to the Widow Clow, pulling a long skinning knife from his coat. “The police, Mother? Ye’d call them fucking peelers on me, would ye?” He brought the knife to within inches of her good eye. “Is that what ye’d do?”

“Sammy—” Kierney began.

“Family business, son, that’s all this is. See, me mother would sell her only son to them peelers and that gets me to thinking I’ve got room for one more down in me workshop.”

The Widow Clow was afraid of no one. She did not back down from man or woman or rabid dog. She ran a house for rough, desperate men in the dirtiest gutter of Edinburgh. But there was fear now in her one eye, and whether that was because her son was capable of matricide or she feared the very idea of him leaving her alone in the world, it was hard to say.

“But I was only rambling, son of mine,” she said. “Surely I’d not sell ye off.”

“There’s a girl,” Kierney said.

Clow put the knife away. “Ye be careful, Mother, speaking like that. Why, there’s resurrectionists in this town that kill for far less.”

The Widow Clow pulled off her gin. “I needed to talk to ye, son. Johnny Sherily was around to see ye early this morning. He said the peelers might be wanting to a-speak with ye.”

Clow glared at her. “And about what?”

“About Ian Slade and his brother, Andy the Piker. Word has it ye brandished yer knife at Slade over to the Grassmarket when they strung Leaky Baker. Threatened him like, they say.”

Clow remembered. But it had been only a defensive measure of sorts. Slade had been drunk and ugly and looking for a fight. “Aye, but it was nothing but a display amongst friends.”

The widow spit tobacco juice into a brass spittoon. “Mayhap it was, but folk in the crowd remembered, Johnny say’d, and they told them peelers all about it.”

Kierney sat forward now. “But there was no harm done… why would the police be interested in that? About Ian and his brother?”

“Because they’re gone, vanished into the night.” She looked from Clow to Kierney. “Johnny say’d there were no foul play, but something worse. He say’d they’d gone up to the North Burial Grounds to fish out a corpse… only they never came back out…”

14

“We’ll do it, Mickey, to prove to ourselves that we’ve not a lick to fear about,” Clow said later that night as he steered Old Clem down the sooty byways of Edinburgh.

“But the North Grounds…”

“Nothing to fear, friend, nothing to fear. Remember? It were the gas that made us see and hear that which were not there at all.”

Kierney nodded but did not look convinced.

The night was quiet. There was only the sound of Old Clem’s hooves on the wet cobblestones, the creak of the buckboard he towed. A few stray autumn leaves blew through the air. To either side, dark-gabled houses of stone and half-timber rose up, leaning out over the street until it seemed their sharp-peaked roofs would touch. They cast thick, reaching pools of shadow into the narrow, winding avenue. Lamps had been extinguished and shutters closed. Only drunks and dogs and rats prowled the lonely wynds now.

Other than grave robbers, that was.

It was November, and soon the ground would be like trying to dig through flint, so Clow figured it was best to lay in a supply of cadavers while they had the chance. Come winter and the snows, the digging was over. Bodies were stored in aboveground vaults and the competition to get at them could be fierce and often dangerous.

“But what of Ian Slade and his brother? Were no gas that made them disappear, Sammy Clow.”

“Rats.”

“Rats?”

Clow nodded. “I’m thinking it must be, Mickey. I told ye the story of me uncle Roy at Ramshorn Cemetery? How them rats had burrowed into that coffin from below?”

“Ye did.”

“Well, that’s what we got here and that’s why were going armed. Not just for the Watch, but for them rats.”

“Ye think rats killed Slade and his brother?”

Clow handed him the reins and packed his clay pipe. “Aye. Rats it were. But not just any rats. I heard tell from Casket Jack down at the Gray Goat about this Russian bark what run aground in the canal two centuries ago, spilled its cargo right over the wharf. She was boarded, but there weren’t no living men aboard, nothing but skeletons and piles of bone that had been gnawed and worried upon. She came aground one dark October night and those that saw her said that hundreds and hundreds of rats came running out… big and gray and red-eyed… the size of cats, they said.” He struck a match off his fingernail and lit his pipe, clouds of smoke wafting over his shoulder. “Now, hear me on this, Mickey, these were no ordinary ship’s rats. They were big and fierce and they had killed the men on that ship, stripped ’em right to bones, the evil bastards. I heard this same story or something like it from me uncle Roy.”

Kierney said, “Rats that kill men… and eat them? Oh, it’s a fable, Sammy. Them rats feed on the dead, sure enough, and they’ll attack ye if yer too weak to fight back… but to take down healthy, able men? It’s a fable, sure it is.”

But Clow shook his head. “No, ye’ve me word on this, me fine old friend. Rats. Rats what out of hell. So we’ve come prepared to deal them a hurt, just look in the back of the wagon. See what ye might there.”

Holding a kerosene lantern aloft, Kierney pulled back the tarps and spilled aside the shovels and picks. The navy flintlock pistols were there, of course, but they had been joined by some heavier artillery: a blunderbuss with folding bayonet and an army .50-caliber smoothbore musket. Both, he saw upon closer examination, primed and powdered. And next to them, wrapped in oilcloth, a ten-pound shank of pork and a wooden box filled with dead fish.

“What the hell, Sammy? Are we having ourselves a picnic tonight or are we fighting a war?”

Clow laughed. “The guns is to protect ourselves with. I’m thinking that blunderbuss can kill quite a few rats, its shot packed with tiny nails as it is. And the food? Well, don’t be handling it without gloves, for there’s enough strychnine in them goodies to kill a hundred men and mayhap a colony of evil rats.”

Without further ado, Clow outlined his plan, which he thought was a good one. They were going to the North Grounds to fish out the body of a handsome young girl who had succumbed to a gas leak, been found dead in the morning by her mother. That was what they were going to do. Dr. Gray would be very happy at such a fine and healthy specimen of eighteen years without a spot of damage. And if while they were there, this ravenous colony of rats showed, they would give them a taste of ball and powder, send ’em running.

“And if we find some of them burrows under the ground? Why, we’re going to set out our bait and kill the bastards and their brood.”

Kierney thought about it. “It sounds a fair plan and surely I’m game.”

“Me uncle Roy said they did it out to Ramshorn,” Clow told him. “Them rats he spoke of… a horrid and foul throng they were. They infested the burial grounds, overrunning not only the aboveground vaults and crypts, but literally honeycombing the earth itself with their tunnels, chewing their way into boxes, and devouring the corpses. Oh, a profanity it surely was.”

“And they poisoned them?”

“Aye, it was the only way. Great sections of the graveyard were collapsing from all that digging going on beneath.” Clow pulled at his wipe. “By this point, why, the sextons and caretakers were not above employing anyone who could help. So they turned to the resurrectionists. And old Uncle Roy? Did he help them? Why, sure he did. He right away knew what to do.”

“Baiting them?”

“Aye, but just not baiting them like any old rat catcher, but baiting them with what they loved best… corpses. Dozens of corpses injected full of poison. The rats got to ’em, and in the following weeks, no more rats.”

Kierney shook his head. “Is this a true story?”

“Why, sure it is.”

“Aye, but at the Glasgow High Churchyard, Sammy, no rats burrowed into that mausoleum… no rats made a burrow like that. It were something else.”

“Well, then,” Clow said, “perhaps tonight we’ll find out what.”

15

The North Burial Grounds was a city of the dead.

Soon as you came through the gates you saw that. In every which direction, tombs. High and low, set into mounds and atop hills. Some were gray and crumbling and covered in wild ivies and vines, sinking into the moist earth, and others stood tall and white and pristine. And between them, slabs and obelisks and marble crosses, intensely crowded gravestones and narrow peaked monuments. Here were dark gray headboard-shaped tombstones with weeping angels and winged death’s heads. Rectangular stones set with rosettes, spades, and hourglasses. And among them, ornate limestone ovals and tall slate half-ovals embellished with skulls and serpents and half-moons. And all of it lorded over by death angels spreading their marble wings and tall, brooding skeletons gripping scythes, their skull faces threaded in cobweb and grave fungi.

“Very quiet,” Kierney said as Clem pulled them through the snaking roads and between stands of craggy black oaks. “Just the way I like it.”

There was a wind, and it was especially chilly here. The trees were stripped of foliage, the byways and footpaths plastered with wet leaves.

“Just ahead,” Clow said, “near to the pauper’s field.”

They both kept an eye out for the Churchyard Watch but saw nothing that concerned them. They passed a silent watchtower and it was dark, festooned with creeping shadows, lifeless as the burial yard itself. Clow reined Old Clem to a stop beneath a pool thrown by interlocking tree branches above.

“Now to business,” he said, his breath frosting in the chill air.

They meandered through the gardens of stones and around leaf-blown sepulchers, pausing at a morbid winged seraph that was very old, its features worn and indistinct. Clow, gripping a spade and pick, sniffed the air for the scent of fresh earth and found it nearly right away. Just on the other side of a wild expanse of bushes shivering in the wind.

“Here she is,” he said, sighting a fresh headstone. “Here’s our girl.”

Kierney brushed leaves away from the grave, tossed aside a funeral wreath, wound his scarf tighter around his throat, and set his hat atop a pointed monument. “Well, me love, we’ll get ye out of that awful place and quick we will.”

He rubbed his hands together to drive the cold out and spread the tarp next to the grave. He pulled on his dirty apron. Then, spade in hand, he began to dig. The ground was very loose, only lightly packed by feet stomping about. It took him about ten minutes to square off the upper half of the grave, dumping clods of earth onto the stretched tarp. Then the real digging began. Since they had Clem with them, it would be necessary to expose only the top of the coffin. Then they could snap the lid and fish their treasure out.

They worked in shifts, first Kierney digging feverishly and expertly while Clow kept watch. When he was down three feet, Clow took over. When he reached the lid and brushed away the dirt, exalting as always in the rich smell of soil, he climbed up out of the grave.

“Make ready, Mickey. I’ll bring Clem around.”

Kierney tossed aside his coat and jumped down into the grave, inserting the broad hooks firmly beneath the lid, arranging the sacking to muffle the sound of the cracking. The casket shifted beneath his weight, but he thought nothing of it. He waited for Clow. Through that cramped opening above, he could see the denuded tree branches scraping together beneath the eye of the moon. A gust pushed leaves up into the air and dozens of them settled down into the grave.

Finally Clow arrived and tossed down the ropes.

It took them less than five minutes to secure the lines to Old Clem’s harness. Then they walked the big draft horse and the ropes pulled tight and with barely any exertion, the upper lid snapped with hardly a discernible noise. Kierney jumped down, undid the hooks, and tossed the sacking up. He pushed aside the fragments of the casket and saw the young lady within.

Even in the moonlight, she was attractive, he decided. Her cheekbones were high, her lips full, her face framed by flowing red hair. “Oi, she’s a beauty, she is. Old Dr. Gray, that buggering pervert, he’ll fall straight in love.”

Often, to quicken things, the rope was noosed around the throat and the body fished up roughly. But this girl was in perfect condition and they didn’t want to damage her. Kierney lifted her up as far as he could and looped the rope under both of her arms, making a tight sling.

“Quit romancing her, ye sick bastard,” Clow said. “I’m freezing me balls off up here.”

“Not much warmer down here, I’m saying to ye. In fact, it’s—”

The words dried up in his throat. The coffin shifted beneath him. First this way, then that. It trembled and sank down deeper an inch or two.

“What? What the hell is it?”

“The box,” Kierney cried out of the hole. “It… it’s moving… I’m coming out.”

He scrambled to his feet, taking the ends of the rope with him. He tossed them up to Clow, started pulling himself out, and then, beneath him, the coffin shuddered… and dropped. Kierney went with it.

Clow was hanging over the edge of the grave, seeing the deep opening below. “Mickey? Mickey? Are ye well?”

“Fuck,” Kierney called up to him. “Bloody fuck… I’m in one of them burrows. Drop me rope, drop me a fucking rope, ye hear?”

Clow threw a line down there, felt it tighten as Kierney gripped it. “Are ye coming?”

There was a flickering light from below and Clow realized he had struck a match down there.

“Sammy?” he called up. “Bring yonder the guns and the lantern. There’s work to be done.”

Clow wasn’t liking it much. The idea of descending into that subterranean lair made his flesh creep and his guts roll over, but if Kierney was down there and not frightened… how bad could it be? He lit the lantern, tied a rope to the handle, and lowered it below. Then dropped down the pistols and rifles, the poisoned meat and fish. Then he went, shimmying down the rope like a monkey down a grapevine.

The stink was the first thing he became aware of as his feet struck the top of the coffin below. It was a mephitic stench like warm and gas-blown things dragged from rivers. It was the stink of death and corruption, of course, but beneath it there was something even worse… something monstrously alive.

“Oi, must be awful big, these fucking rats of yours, Sammy,” Kierney said, wedging one of the flintlock pistols through the belt that held up his pants. “Not thinking I wish to be here when they come home. Not at all, says I.”

Clow hopped down off the casket, took one of the pistols and then the lantern from Kierney. The bottom of the grave was about seven feet up, the stars and fresh air another six above that. The burrow they were in was nearly perfectly round and big enough to stand up in. Some work had gone into excavating it; there was no doubt of that. It ran off into the darkness behind them, splitting off into two separate tunnels that were considerably smaller. Ahead of them, just a single passage, the roof of which sloped downward.

Clow did not like this place.

It made him feel claustrophobic and dirty, his throat scratchy. Everything was close, pressing in, constricting. There was about a half-inch of slimy water on the floor. The musty reek of carrion and that high, sickening air itself made something in his brain flinch, filled his mind with writhing maggots. He believed that he knew what it must be like to be buried alive.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Kierney said.

“Aye, if yer a corpse worm or a graveyard rat.”

Clow stuffed the pistol through his belt as Kierney had done, took up the musket. “Well, should we do a wee bit of exploring, old friend?”

“Not to me liking, but if you say.” Kierney picked up the blunderbuss and the box of poisoned fish. “Let’s bait these bastards. Spread these fish about into the tunnel, leave the meat here.”

Clow nodded, leading them forward.

Within ten feet, the floor became increasingly muddy… soft and swampy. Their brogans sank right up to the ankles in spots. The roof sloped ever downward and the walls narrowed, clots of rank earth dropping all around them. They had to move at a crouch now, breathing hard, perspiring and shaking and expecting God only knew what. The walls of the passage were slimy and sweating black water that stank like the runoff of corpses. Colonies of bloated, fleshy mushrooms sprouted from crevices. It was like being in some stinking, elongated grave. The main passage kept branching off into arteries… much smaller, yet certainly large enough for a man.

“Listen,” Kierney said.

Clow heard it, all right: the skitter and squeaking of rats. Many, many rats. Now was the time to turn back, to leave the rest of this horror to the imagination. There would be plenty of nights and plenty of pints over which to fill in the blanks of what lay ahead. Yet… he did not honestly want to turn back. Going forward was sheer madness, but he wanted to. He wanted to see what this was all about. Sure, there were rats ahead and probably behind, too. But it was not possible for them to have carved out this labyrinth. Something else had.

And he wanted to see it.

They came to a large passage that led away down, down. It was big enough for a man, of course, but neither of them were going down there. Clow held the lantern in there. In the distance, he could make out something like a chamber or pit and what seemed to be hundreds and hundreds of greasy, plump furry bodies filling it up. Thousands of beady eyes were reflected pink and shining in the light.

“Rats,” Clow said. “A den of ’em.”

He took the box from Kierney and opened the lid, tossing the whole thing down the tunnel. It tumbled end over end, spilling dead fish. The rats scattered, swarming around, a few daring individuals moving stealthily up the tunnel.

“Aye, I’ve had me fill,” Kierney said. “Let’s get back up where we can breathe.”

Clow nodded. It was enough.

He was breathing very fast, he realized, like the air had gone bad and he was slowly suffocating. It was more than just the air, though, but the idea that if there were all these burrows, there might be burrows beneath them, too. That at any moment, the floor might give away and drop them below, from where there would be no escape.

“Ahead… what’s that?” Kierney said.

They moved forward and the tunnel opened up into something like a room. There were bones scattered everywhere, all of them nibbled and set with teeth marks. Some had been snapped right in half, as if by huge jaws.

Clow panned the light about.

He saw skulls and rib cages, shiny white femurs and ulnas. Mummified cadavers were tangled in rotting cerements. There were shattered caskets, too, some of them crushed to kindling, others broken open… mildewed satin linings hanging out like guts. A few skeletons were embedded right into the muddy walls as if they were trying to climb out.

Kierney kept trying to lick his lips. “Sammy… lookit this… this is where that Corpse King dumps its litter… all around us.”

Clow was holding the lantern up high, noticing that the roof went up and up until there was no roof. Just an oval passage that led right into a crypt. He could see arched beams and cement walls. Just like the vault they’d visited that awful night in Glasgow.

Yes, that’s right, Sammy. And you remember what was looking up at you as you looked down from above?

Kierney stepped among the decomposing bones and skulls threaded with fungi. He found the remains of fresher corpses… limbs and trunks, most badly worried. A complete cadaver was settled in the corner, a fine mesh of mildew growing over its face. Its head lolled at a sickening angle from the neck and its chest seemed to have been crushed. In fact, the entire body had been smashed with such pressure that viscera had been forced from its mouth. Beetles crawled all over it, tunneling into it.

“That… that face,” Kierney said. “I recognize it… it’s—”

“Keith Strand,” Clow said. “He disappeared a few weeks back, maybe a month.”

The stench of the chamber was roiling and hot and nauseating. Like sticking your face into the slit belly of a putrescent corpse… and inhaling. It was that revolting, that physically appalling.

And you stay here much longer, Clow told himself, and you’ll know worse. You’ll know something much, much worse.

He knew it to be true. For already the chamber and tunnel system was filling with a presence, a palpable sense of something immense and rancid and spiritually evil. It made his guts clench like a fist, bile squirt up the back of his throat.

Kierney said, “I think we’d best be getting on our way, Sammy.”

Clow was in complete agreement. The tunnel ahead sloped down and down, farther into the earth and maybe straight down into the bowels of hell, for all he knew. All he was certain of was that he honestly did not want to find out.

About then the chamber began to vibrate. The walls shook and clots of earth began to fall around them as if a cave-in was beginning. The mucky, slopping ground under their feet thrummed as if a train was approaching.

Yes, something was coming.

Clow froze up, feeling the musket in his fists and wondering if he’d have the steel to use it when the time came. For surely, that time was coming. There was about to be a dire intersection of fates—theirs and that of the thing that crawled beneath graveyards.

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.

16

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.

That in the end, he would know the charnel embrace of the Corpse King.

17

Dr. Gray said he had need of a young woman, preferably in her early twenties or late teens, for a demonstration of female reproductive anatomy. Clow was only too happy to oblige. Within a few days, he found what he was looking for at St. Martin’s Cemetery. A heavy, cumbersome mortstone had been placed over the grave, and it took all of two hours to move it aside sufficiently to get at the grave.

“Oi, me back,” Kierney said when they were finished. “If you would be so kind as to pull them nails out… right into me spine, they are.”

Clow said, “I feel ’em, too, but mine are spikes what from the railroad.”

“Did I say nails? Skewers is what they are, a baker’s dozen right in me back, driven through with a hammer.”

They sat on a nearby slab and had themselves a pipe and a touch of rum. The night had gone chill and dark, the moon lodged in a bank of feathery caliginous clouds the color of coal dust. St. Martin’s was a hilly run of close-packed headstones, leaning this way and that, riding the hills like squat, flattened fence posts. The last time they had been here, some weeks before, they discovered a group of resurrectionists already digging. Tonight, they were alone.

They knew they had a job ahead of them. The Churchyard Watch was out in such numbers that it was too dangerous to bring the horse and buckboard with them. So they would have break open the coffin themselves, then cart the body away on foot. No easy nor enjoyable matter on a damp, cold night where the wind went right through a man.

“On with it, then,” Clow said.

They started digging. St. Martin’s was no different from any dozen other graveyards in the area—saturated. The rains had come again, washing the last of the autumn color from the trees and leaving the world gray and leaden. The soil was wet and heavy, like shoveling mud. It was very slow going and they worked in shifts. Each square foot of earth was a labor that drove those nails and spikes deeper into their backs and by the time they struck the box, Kierney could barely straighten up.

“If, six months from now,” he said, leaning against his spade, “you should find me on some street corner, hunched over and broken, selling flowers, trouble yourself not about it, Samuel Clow. For I bear you no ill will for breaking me fucking back.”

“Kind of you, I say.”

“It’s the way I am,” Kierney said as Clow scraped away the dirt from the upper third of the coffin lid. “All me life I’ve had a soft heart. It’s been me downfall, me charitable and God-fearing ways.”

“Aye, that it has.”

Clow secured the hooks and they took the ropes and began pulling and yanking, straining and swearing. Shrouded in sackcloth as usual, the lid gave only a dull report as it went. Like a snapped board heard miles distant. Clow cleaned the splinters away and, together, they began to drag the body up and up. The lady was wrapped up snugly in her moist cerements and it took some doing to get her up and out of that box.

“Let’s have a look,” Kierney said, pulling his penknife and preparing to slit the cerecloth.

“Aye, we should—”

“You, there!” a voice cried out. “Grave robbers! You halt right now and stop what you’re doing!”

Before either of them could do much but turn and look, a figure dashed in their direction with a lantern held high. Kierney stood and a shot rang out like thunder in those silent environs. He made a choking sound and folded up without another noise. The watchman got in close and Clow brought the blade of his shovel down on the man’s head. When he found the ground, Clow kept at it until his head was nearly split like a gourd.

He gave the dead man a kick. “What’s that, guv? Tired, are you? Prefer to lay and take a nap? That’s fine, just fine.” He went down on his knees by Kierney, pulled his old friend up, saw the twin streams of blood running down his chin, the wetness at his chest. In the dappled lantern light, he could see that Kierney’s eyes were open. “All right, love, all right, let’s have none of that, now, shall we? Can you speak? Can you tell me… oh, dear Christ, Mickey Kierney, not this, you’re not doing this to me, are you? You’re not leaving me alone now, for I wouldn’t know what to do without you, oh, give us a wink or a smile, oh, Mickey, oh, my friend, oh, not this…”

Clow had to leave him.

Others were coming… and in numbers.

He took their tools and threw the bundled-up woman over his shoulder and stalked off into the night. He left more behind than Kierney’s cooling remains, but a good part of his heart and soul and so many things he would never properly know.

Then the night had him and from his own throat he heard a wracked sobbing.

18

It was later and Clow was drunk and in a foul mood.

Soon as he stepped in the door of the Seven Keys, he heard his mother’s voice calling to him. He was not in the mood. Not in the mood for anything at that point, and the old cow should have known it by the look on his face. But she was well into her cups, and sensitivity was not among her natural rhythms.

Looking upon her, he hated.

And somehow, yes, he blamed the old witch for the dire event his life had become through the years. Yes, he looked upon her, and she was everything he had endured, everything he had missed or wanted and been denied. She was the cancer of his existence that had been chewing a hole through his belly from day one.

“What the fuck ye looking at, ye great scab?” she said to him.

Clow laughed.

And kept laughing.

He was remembering their flat as a boy after his father had gone. The two stinking rooms, his sisters and he living off crusts of bread and turnip tops while his mother drank the money she lifted her skirts for. He could see the flat, the narrow bed he shared with his sisters, feel the coarse sheets and the bite of the bugs that infested the mattress, hear his mother’s squeals and groans from the other room. He could smell the woodsmoke and mildew, feel the creeping dampness and see the cracked plaster and the fine layer of black soot that lay over everything. Overflowing piss buckets. Dead rats under the beds and in the cupboards. The stink of the clogged sewers below and the public well that seeped gray water. He could feel the cold rain dripping through holes in the roof and smell the fevers of his sisters, hear them coughing out wads of phlegm and blood. The rats scratching in the walls. He could see his sisters’ dirty, scabbed feet, feel the badly worn clothes he wore that the other children laughed at. Yes, that was his life as a boy. Always hungry, always tired, always sick and hurting. Watching his siblings sicken and die, one after the other.

And what was the one constant in that hell? What was the poison that never stopped burning in his guts?

Clow wiped a tear from his eye. “Hello, me mother,” he managed.

“And what vile sewer have you come crawling from, Sammy Clow?” the widow asked him, spitting on the floor at the sight of him. “You’ve got the Devil’s own mark upon you and the stink of corpses and mortuaries, you do. Out stealing babies from cold wombs, were you? Aye, what graves have you been a-rifling this night, you disgusting worm, you wriggling bit of slug that calls himself a man?”

Clow stared at her, kept staring. Something in him went with a wet snap and then his eyes were bright and he was grinning like a slavering dog. “Why, only the one grave, me dear sweet whore of a mother, only the one.” He crossed behind her, helped himself to her gin and she let fly a string of expletives, but all he could do was laugh.

“Oh, me mother, how could you be so cold and callous this night? How could that be? Is there no warmth in your heart, eh? No warmth in that cold clot of heart for your son? And me losing me chum and mate, me best friend Mickey Kierney—”

“Trash, refuse, garbage! Drainage, nothing but a foul drainage! Vile and disgusting bastard, he was. A man like him belongs in a prison or a workhouse, in a cage with the rest of his kind, smarmy and repellent ass that he was—”

Clow laughed and tears flowed from his eyes. “Oh, he was all them things, I reckon, and possibly a few more, and I loved him like me brother and still do, only more so now. But, aye, I robbed only the one grave this night and look what I found for you, Mum. Cor, it’s a pretty necklace, and see how it fits round your throat and holds tight, so very tight. Like a queen or high lady you are now, oh, don’t try and speak, don’t try and do nothing… aye, that’s a girl, go quiet, now, go quiet… lovely is your throat and purple is your face… go quiet, as ye should have a long time ago… oh, me poor dear mother… a rest for ye now… a long rest, ye filthy whore…”

19

The next week was difficult for Samuel Clow.

Whatever had kept him going so long in that dim, despairing city bled out of him like blood and what was left was something that walked and drank, but did not smile nor emote. He saw the city, finally, as it truly was… a diseased carcass spilling a rotting green bile to the streets that infected all who lived and survived those filthy wynds and dark-smelling closes. Drunken mothers and starving children, gin-drowsy babies and thieves and pickpockets, swindlers and whores. A great seething stew of rot boiling into a sickening miasma and dying, dying every day. Workhouses and prisons, plagues and infirmity and violent death. And vermin. Always the rats and flies and slat-thin dogs picking away at what red meat was left on the emaciated corpse of the Old Town slums.

Yes, the city was decaying and sickened and he with it, crouching behind damp stone walls and in narrow alleyways. If he closed his eyes, he could hear the rumble of its empty belly and the tubercular wheeze of its lungs, smell the rotting houses and backed-up cisterns, the filth and the garbage and the putrefying human refuse. All around him, the city creaked and settled and rattled like the bones of a dying old man.

Clow stayed away from the Sign of the Boar and the Hogshead Inn and those other dens of the body-snatchers. Kierney’s body had been found, he knew, and it was no secret what he had been doing when he was shot down that night. So Clow stayed away and gravitated toward the beggars on the High Street. He lost himself in their numbers, swam in that sea of lice and filth that was their birthright. They accepted and did not question. There were hundreds of them crowded into just a few blocks, dirty and wrapped in rags, boasting sores and disfigurements and bleeding scalps, leprous fingers always scratching and working for coin. Some had been disfigured in wars, others in industrial accidents. But to a man and woman, they were all the same. They had all suffered and Clow felt that he belonged with them. They accepted him. All those Shivering Jemmys and fingerless pickpockets, rawboned Judies blind from grain alcohol and syphilitic haybags whose minds had finally curdled into a yellow mush. Together, then, a few old and crippled grave robbers among them, they huddled in the slimy byways of the rookery and worked the shallow, hungry, always hungry.

Now and again, a fine square-rigged gentlemen would come by and hold out a few shillings, wanting to know what happened to Clow, what his malady was. So he would weave him a fine and randy tale of graves and bodies snatched and a fine friend shot down in his prime, and of that other, that malefic corpse-fisher that haunted the bone-strewn catacombs of the burial grounds to the east and west and, yes, especially the north.

“Poor devil is mad,” they would say and drop a bit of silver in his cup.

With the beggars, he watched the fine girls and boys making for church on Sunday morning, refusing to look upon him and his kin. Some of them picked at steaming beef pies bought from the pie man and that which they didn’t eat, they tossed to the dogs rather than the wretched human waste crying out for food and coin. Even the cat-meat man and ragpickers avoided them.

Clow had buried himself in the dung of the city, but the city itself kept moving along, grinding away.

And eventually, tired of it all, he had to go back to work.

The Seven Keys was out of the question, for the police learned soon enough who Mickey Kierney’s partner in crime was. In the streets and dark, stinking closes, they were waiting for him, waiting to have a word with him and Clow was thinking that conversation might just end with a short drop and a fine hemp noose for the member of the Churchyard Watch he had happily put down.

But work there was, so he found new digs. Damp and dirty and gaslit, a few diseased and buggy sheets to cover himself with. At night, trembling with fear of whispers and footsteps on the landing, he would peer out his dirty windows, study the intricate clockwork of the slums themselves. Everything down there was grim and gray and degenerating. He could see the high ragged towers of the tenements, the leaning houses crowded between, jagged roofs and crumbling walls and smoky lanes cut through them.

And one night, too afraid to go out himself, he saw a couple men dragging a cart through the moonlit streets. Grave robbers, resurrectionists… Yes, it could have been Kierney and he. And it was, just a few weeks before.

And this, more than anything, made him go out and earn a living. Because he knew what he was and what he would always be: a thing of shadows and cellars that slipped out by night to exhume corpses. A graveyard rat he was.

One that waited for the cemetery dirge of the Corpse King to call him into oozing graveyard depths and put him to bed with a clammy midnight kiss.

Orders were coming in and what he needed was at the North Burial Grounds.

So he began to make plans.

20

That afternoon, he paid Mickey Kierney a visit.

The day had gone unseasonably warm. Old Mickey was over to the Canongate Tolbooth, the city gaol. Clow went there, knowing he was taking an awful chance that the police might see him, might recognize him, throw him in irons and be done with the whole mess. But still he went, his badly worn John Bull hat pulled down low over his eyes. He had to see Mickey one last time, and no peelers or bailies were going to stop him. Maybe he was waltzing happily into their arms and maybe part of him wanted it that way.

He moved with the crowd that had come to gawk and stare.

The tolbooth was an imposing five-story building assembled from dirty brick with high turreted steeples overhead. The gaol itself was in the cellars of the tolbooth and through rusting gratings set near the very tops of the cells which looked out at street level, you could hear men screaming in the dank darkness below.

Clow moved with the others beneath the arches and into the courtyard, where he found Mickey dangling in a rising mist of flies, receiving all visitors and at all hours. A law had been passed in 1751 that decreed that all murderers and grave robbers should either be publicly dissected or hung in chains. And for Mickey Kierney, it was the latter.

It wasn’t hard finding him.

You just had to follow your nose.

For invariably the stink of rank corruption would lead you to Gibbet Row. And as Clow stood there among those hanging cages, his stomach in his throat, the people came and went but rarely lingered… the gawkers and onlookers and the morbidly curious. They spilled from rooming houses and pubs and mills, from hearthside and fish stall and New Town office. Working men in leather aprons, muddy brogans, and threadbare open-weave jackets. Rich men in shiny tailcoats and white breeches and jeweled waistcoats. Street women stinking of gin in ratty calico and woolen skirts. Little boys in skeleton suits, silk stockings, and breeches. Fine ladies in silk dresses pressing perfumed handkerchiefs to their delicate noses. Little girls in lace bonnets and plaid tams, sobbing at the smell. Yes, they all came to see the meat hung in the gibbets, to look upon horror and give warning to their children of the fate that waited those who broke the King’s laws.

Clow stood behind an old man in a soft mulberry coat the color of ripe plums. The man held the hand of a little boy, making the child look at what was in those suspended cages.

“What did that one do?” the boy asked.

The old man paused with his snuffbox in hand. “Eh? That one? Nothing but a filthy grave robber.”

They moved on, but Clow just stood there, feeling sick and angry and terribly alone. There were some six others gibbeted, but Clow only saw Mickey, his old and dear friend.

The gibbet was no simple cage but a carefully engineered device to display the dead in an upright position or to bring a slow and agonizing death to the condemned. Around the torso was a cage of riveted hoops and uprights, the head enclosed in a similar device, the neck manacled in place so the head could not dangle too far to either side. Iron rings and bars encircled and supported the legs, and at the lower extremity of these were circular plates for the feet to rest on. Set into the bottom of each of these were iron spikes that were inserted into the soles of the corpse’s feet… and if you were put in there alive, to starve slowly to death as many were, the spikes would slowly pierce your feet as your own body weight settled down upon them. The wrists and ankles were manacled and chained into place so as the body decomposed, it could not collapse.

This then was the gibbet, a cage hung six or seven feet in the air, for young and old to marvel at.

Criminals had been gibbeted alive and dead, left in the cages sometimes for years to slowly mummify in the elements. Sometimes the gibbets were erected at crossroads or atop cliffs overlooking the sea. Especially cruel methods were often employed for those hung in chains while alive… a loaf of bread might be dangled just outside the cage, but a metal spike pressed against the throat of the condemned so that if they dared moved toward the bread, the spike would puncture their throat. Hundreds of criminals starved slowly in the Edinburgh gibbets through the centuries. If their crimes were particularly offensive—like witchcraft or heresy—they might be cut down, disemboweled with hooks, entrails burned, and body quartered… each quarter hung at a different crossroads as a warning. Mostly, it was corpses placed in the gibbet. Sometimes they were left until they rotted away or the insects picked them clean.

And this, Clow knew with a sinking heart, was to be Mickey Kierney’s fate.

A wetness misting his eyes, Clow coughed into his handkerchief, turning away from Mickey and appraising the other poor souls in the hanging cages. Four men and one woman, all dangling in those horrible contraptions, cadaverous bird-picked faces leering with empty sockets and screaming with sprung jaws, all suspended in a hot, fetid flow of decomposition. They were nests of flies and baskets of writhing maggots. Wilted and rawboned scarecrows worried by vermin, made of bamboo and reed and discolored straw, their stuffing hanging out in decaying spirals, graveyard ribbons that tattered in the breeze. They were bloated and decompressed sculptures welded together from rungs of polished white bone that had burst through their fading canvas hides, revealing seams of yellow fat and pink meaty gizzard and looping pockets of graveworms. Their blackening flesh had gone to a warm, bubbling wax, melting to a green and gray flyspecked tallow.

And, dear God, the vermin.

The cages were speckled white from bird droppings. Rooks and crows and ravens perched atop the gibbets, plucking out eyes and strips of red meat, worrying skin from sallow faces and graying lips from mouths. They fed on the carrion in the cages and the worms busy tunneling within. As they darted into feed, huge buzzing clouds of meatflies lifted and descended again to eat and mate and lay their eggs. The bodies dripped black bile and a waxy corpse ooze, bits of them flaking off and dropping to the ground below where the ants and beetles had gathered by the thousands in a creeping, living carpet.

As a final indignity, the cadavers in the cages had been pelted by rotting fruit, even though the guards were supposed to discourage this. But mostly they just turned away, offended that they had to spend the day with rank gibbeted carrion.

Kierney had been there a week—the freshest of the lot—and already his face was meatless, his eyes gone. His body moved in a slow and sickening undulation from the activity of the worms within.

Clow did not want to look upon his old friend in any detail, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

Standing there, the crowd moving off, he said, “I got the ripe bastard what done this to ye, Mickey. Certain, I did. I believe he died knowing a fierce agony.”

But if Kierney had anything to say, he kept quiet about it, dangling there in his riveted cage while the crawling things and pecking things kept at him, making him shudder and jerk.

Although Clow knew it was Kierney from the hair atop his head and the rags of his clothes, it was hard to believe that this thing was indeed his old mate. He hung there in the gibbet, a gruesome freakshow dummy cut from dirty ice and seamed rubber, his corpse grin like a sickle. Maybe it wasn’t Mickey at all but just something made of gray corpse fat that had been pressed into a mold, a husk and a wraith and a stew of rot intended to scare the kiddies.

Clow wasn’t sure how long he’d stood there, but soon enough, it seemed, the shadows had grown long and the guards were eyeing him suspiciously and a pale moon began to rise. He would have stood there all night, but the guards tired of him and tossed him back through the arches onto the wet cobbles of the Canongate. In the moonlight, a horse and wagon pulled up.

“Ye there,” said the old man in the high seat. “Ye best climb aboard.”

Clow, still sitting in the damp, saw Johnny Sherily at the reins, lean and strong, his white hair whipping about him in the breeze. He got up into the wagon and Sherily pulled away instantly, tipping his hat to the guards.

“None too bright ye are, Sammy Clow,” Sherily said. “Whatever possessed ye to be coming to the tolbooth? Lucky ye were they did not recognize ye, for them peelers is all a-hunting ye. Aye, poor old Mickey was the bait and ye came right for it, ye silly git. Lucky them police are just plain stupid.”

Clow licked his lips, tried to breathe warmth into his cupped hands. “I… I had to see me mate one last time.”

“And so ye have and what of it?”

But Clow could not answer that question. Something had held him there, made him look at that ravaged corpse for hours and hours and he did not know what it was, but thought maybe it was his soul preparing him for the state he would soon be in.

21

There were lots of reasons not to go to the North Burial Grounds.

Clow would have needed more than ten fingers to count them all.

Maybe it was Johnny Sherily’s stories or maybe Mickey Kierney’s death, but it was not a place he wished to go. But business was business. He had been there countless times before, of course, but this night the burial ground was grim beyond belief. A wild and unkempt mutiny of crosses and stones, crumbling sepulchers and overgrown vaults, fallen tombstones and frost-heaved slabs. Dead flowers drooped from cracked stone urns. The sky had pissed rain and snow off and on all evening, and where things weren’t frosted white they were splashed with cold mud, great pools of gray ice-sheathed water lying in hollows and depressions. Battalions of markers and shafts rose from these leaf-covered ponds, buoys pointing out sunken graves and abyssal mysteries.

Spades, hooks, and rope in tow, Clow moved through the muck toward the rear of the cemetery where the chapel rose gray and morose like the tomb of some fallen god. A slight wind blew, rattling dark trees and scattering leaves and snow.

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.

22

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.

And above, always above, looking down was the glowering eye of the moon. Whenever Clow saw it, he screamed thinking it was the eye of the Corpse King.

And maybe it was.

He needed to get back to the Seven Keys, but sometimes he wasn’t sure where it was. So he darted down alleys heaped with rubbish, fought slavering dogs and fled from packs of skittering rats. He stumbled through gutters flowing with sewage and didn’t move quite fast enough when a chamber pot was emptied from above. Black and stinking, slinking like the vermin he had become, he ran and hid and giggled hysterically. When he saw two diggers pulling a dog cart, he shrieked like a lunatic.

But finally, he reached the archway that led to his close, to the Seven Keys.

He moved quietly, only mumbling softly to himself. The corpse of a man was sprawled at a doorstep, drowning in a pool of blood and vomit. The door of the public privy was swinging wide, the pit overflowing, the stench unbearable. The pigs had burst their pen and were rooting about in there, slopping up what they found. The Seven Keys was just ahead… nighted and looming. The stink of butchered hogs was ripe in the air… greasy carcasses and moist piles of entrails. Sewage in the gutter flowed past the steps. Men slept in their own vomit on the walks.

But finally, yes, he was home.

Down into the cellar he went, locking the door behind him, smelling his stock and liking it. It was some time before he dared light a single candle. And when he did he saw wreckage… someone or something had been in there, shattering vats and scattering bones and leaving a black slime in its passing.

And then Clow noticed the far wall.

A great hole had been eaten through it, a shadowy tunnel led away down into the earth.

Stifling a scream, Clow hid behind a cask of pickled babies, trembling.

He didn’t wait long. For soon enough a voice that was broken and deranged echoed out at him: “Oi, Sammy… tomorrow night I’d like something not too blown with gas and set with worms… something moist and chewy… Did ye hear me, Sammy? Eh, there’s a good lad, keep me belly full and ye’ll stay alive…”

23

The days passed in a sepulchral blur.

Clow did a lot of digging and a lot of snatching and the meat was always gladly taken. But it had to come screeching to an end sooner or later and then one rainy night, it did just that.

The police were waiting for him in their long coats and tall hats and dark badges when he got back to the cellar. They took hold of him and pushed him roughly down the steps. Into that dissection room of bones and pickled organs, salted babies and mildewing cadavers.

The stink was unbearable.

The floor had been dug up and a gagging, putrescent mist came off what had been uncovered.

A policeman with a bushy mustache and mutton-chop sideburns said, “Like a morgue in here, dear Christ, like a morgue.” He slapped Clow across the face and kept slapping him until Clow fell to that oozing, moist earth, sobbing and giggling. “Got to be the remains of a hundred in here, you dirty bastard, you sick and wretched ghoul… you’ll swing for this, God help me, you will…”

A couple other peelers were examining the hole in the wall and the great passage beyond. Using lamps they went in there, returning a few minutes later.

“Bones in there,” one of them said. “It must go on for a mile… nothing in there but bones. Bones that have been chewed and snapped.”

Clow tried to explain. “It were the king, the Corpse King. I was a-feeding him, I had to feed him! Ye ask Johnny Sherily if it all isn’t so, swear to God, swear to—”

But they just beat him to the floor. They didn’t want to hear anymore. They were pale and sickened and badly wanted to hurt Clow worse than they already had.

Another policeman wearing rubber gloves up to his elbows said, “Aye, a hundred corpses, sure. And that’s not counting the skulls and bottled parts.” He pulled the lid off a cask, digging around in there and yanking up a corpse out of the stinking brine by its hair. The bloated, furrowed face stared out at them. “And not counting these pickled ones, either.”

Clow was grinning and trembling. “You’d please to be careful of that one, kind sir, it being me mother and all…”

And that was how Samuel Clow finally found the gallows, the grave, and the thing that waited with ravening jaws for him beyond.

Hang Burke, banish Hare,

Burn Knox in Surgeon’s Square.

—nineteenth-century Scottish children’s rhyme

About the Editors

RICHARD CHIZMAR is the founder and publisher/editor of Cemetery Dance magazine and the Cemetery Dance Publications book imprint. He has edited more than a dozen anthologies, including The Best of Cemetery Dance, The Earth Strikes Back, Night Visions 10, October Dreams (with Robert Morrish), and the Shivers series.

BRIAN JAMES FREEMAN is the managing editor of Cemetery Dance Publications and the author of several novels and novellas, along with four short-story collections, including an ebook-only exclusive that hit #1 on Amazon.com in the US, UK, Germany, Spain, and France in the short-story categories. His blog and website can be found at: http://www.BrianJamesFreeman.com.

Praise for the Dark Screams series

“A wicked treat [featuring] … some of the genre’s best.”

—Hellnotes, on Volume One

“Five fun-to-read stories by top-notch horror scribes. How can you lose? The answer: you can’t.”

—Atomic Fangirl, on Volume Two

“If you have not tried the series yet, do yourself a favor and grab a copy of any (or all) of the books for yourself.”

—Examiner.com, on Volume Three

“Fans of horror of every variety will find something to love in these pages.”

—LitReactor, on Volume Four

“[Volume Five] runs the gamut from throwback horror to lyrical and heartbreaking tales.”

—Publishers Weekly

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Copyright

Dark Screams: Volume Six is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Hydra Ebook Original

Copyright © 2017 by Brian James Freeman and Richard Chizmar

“The Rich Are Different” by Lisa Morton, copyright © 2017 by Lisa Morton

“The Manicure” by Nell Quinn-Gibney, copyright © 2017 by Nell Quinn-Gibney

“The Comforting Voice” by Norman Prentiss, copyright © 2017 by Norman Prentiss

“The Corpse King” by Tim Curran, copyright © 2010 by Tim Curran

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

HYDRA is a registered trademark and the HYDRA colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

“The Corpse King” was originally published separately by Cemetery Dance Publications in 2010.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Darhansoff & Verrill, Literary Agents: “The Old Dude’s Ticker” by Stephen King, copyright © 2000 by Stephen King. Originally published in NECON XX 2000 in 2000 and in The Big Book of NECON (Forest Hill, MD: Cemetery Dance Publications, 2009). Reprinted by permission of Darhansoff & Verrill, Literary Agents.

John Hawkins and Associates, Inc.: “The Situations” (originally published as “Extenuating Circumstances”) from Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque by Joyce Carol Oates (New York: Dutton, 1995), copyright © 1994 by The Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins and Associates, Inc.

Ebook ISBN 9780399181931

Cover design: Elderlemon Design

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Content

DARK SCREAMS
VOLUME SIX
Edited by Brian James Freeman and Richard Chizmar

The Old Dude’s Ticker Stephen King

The Rich Are Different Lisa Morton

The Manicure Nell Quinn-Gibney

The Comforting Voice Norman Prentiss

The Situations Joyce Carol Oates

The Corpse King Tim Curran

About the Editors

Praise for the Dark Screams series

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