Dark Screams: Volume Six

The Corpse King ^{Tim Curran}

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.

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.

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:

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…”

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…”

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.”

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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…”

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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…”

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.

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.

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.

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…”

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.