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 alclass="underline"
DRUNK FOR A PENNY
DEAD DRUNK FOR TWO
A beggar broke into some off-key Irish dirge. A ragpicker vomited upon himself and fell straight over in his chair. Two foundry workers arm-wrestled for the right to bed a fresh, voluptuous prostitute. A sailor fornicated with his whore on the filthy, muddy floor while a group of onlookers placed bets as to the duration of the coupling. And everywhere, everywhere, at the Sign of the Boar, laughter and arguments, people shouting and screaming and begging and crying. Fighting and lovemaking and singing and wagering and dancing. And people, always people. Chimney sweeps with soot-blackened faces. Fishermen reeking of oil. Smithies with callused fingers. Textile workers—piecers, loomers, and scavengers—spending the few pennies they’d earned in fifteen, sixteen hours of degrading, demanding labor. The rich and poor alike drank and whored and sang and spilled their drinks and overturned their plates of fish and sausages to the floor… but nothing went to waste, for pallid-faced children adorned in rags would crawl about on their hands and knees, fighting dogs for the scraps of soda bread, kippers, and shepherd’s pie.
Through this human zoo of smoke, body odor, and cheap cologne, a tall, lanky man made his way. His chin was bristled with white whiskers, his gray hair falling to his shoulders. “Aye,” he said when he’d reached the body-snatcher’s table, helping himself to Clow’s mug, “not many good ones left like Stubby McCoy.”
“Well, if it ain’t Johnny Sherily, and him in the flesh,” Kierney said. “Have a drink with us, Johnny. To the old days and older ways.”
Sherily squeezed in at the bench, dipped into his snuffbox, and inhaled a pinch. “All of us sitting here, then, together. What a lovely sight. And to imagine, our ranks thinning by the month.”
“More for us,” another chimed in.
“Aye, for there’s gold in them boneyards yonder,” Clow said, filling his pipe.
That got a few laughs, but barely a grimace from Sherily. The resurrectionists to a man looked up at him like pups to their mother. “Mayhap, mayhap. Gold, there may be… but something else as well, eh, lads? Something not so shiny nor glittering.”
Clow knew then where this was going, what oft-tread superstitious roads Sherily would take them down. Not even the offer of a fresh round could dissuade those grimy-faced men from hearing what the old gent had to say.
“In the North Burial Grounds, for instance,” Sherily said as if he were chewing on rancid meat. “There’s something there, friends, something one and all should avoid, I would think.”
“Stories,” Kierney said. “Crazy stories spun by old ladies.”
Sherily grunted. “Stories, are they? Yarns, would they be?” He fixed Kierney with those granite-hard eyes of his, impaled him, held him aloft for the others to see. “Tell that to Jib McDonald or Keith Strand or me own poor brother Ronny. Or to any of the other snatchers what disappeared in the North Grounds. And what of Dennis Fahey? Him they found in the morning, clutching a grave marker with cold, dead fingers, his lovely red hair gone white and his heart burst in his chest. And his face? By the saints, all the horror from the dark, crawling corners of this world was bottled up in those staring eyes. Aye… and what cause that, I put to you, Mickey Kierney and Sammy Clow? What cause that?”
Clow puffed off his pipe, smoke billowing from his nostrils. “Well, it not be spook nor wraith nor bogey, you can be sure it is true.”
Sherily looked over those hard, set faces. “The North Grounds are plagued by something and we all know that, don’t we? Who amongst us has not heard them there sounds coming from the moist earth? The rumblings as of a belly or that fleshly pounding as from some subterranean devil’s heart?”
“Rats,” Clow said, sipping his gin.
“Rats, is it?” Sherily laughed at this. “Not rats, me fine young friend, it not be no rats that make them sounds far down below. You’ve all heard them, have you not? In the North Grounds, when you pull up a box… those echoes of something vast far beneath you… the scrapings and stirrings, clawings and slitherings. Rats, you say? My arse it’s rats.”
“It can be nothing but rats,” Clow maintained.
Sherily put those gray eyes on him; they glittered like chips of flint. “Would you tell me my business, Samuel Clow? Is that it? Did I not work the hollows with Burke and Hare in the old merry days? Was I not there when Burke swung? Did I not bring cold cuts to Dr. Knox at Surgeon’s Square? Have I not worked every kirkyard and burial ground from Chirnside to Musselburgh? Aye, I have. That was me, you wee bastard, and I was doing me digging when you were still licking cream from yer mother’s tit. Don’t tell me my business, Samuel Clow, for I know the tombyards and kirks better than the worms.”
“You’ve been sweet on the drink for too many years, Johnny Sherily, and this is a fact, I say,” Clow said to them all. “Ain’t nothing in the North Grounds. Nothing but money a-moldering in the ground.”
But no one seemed to believe him. Most had stopped digging there, rooting out the fresh cadavers. And it had nothing to do with guards or dogs or booby-trapped graves. It was something much worse, something that filled all their bellies with a cold and greasy stew.
“I like me potions much as the next man,” Sherily said, “but no man in his right mind digs in the North Grounds. I won’t go out there no more. No sane man will.” He emptied Clow’s mug. “Aye, for I’ve come as close to what haunts that graveyard as any man, do you hear? And more than once. Many’s the time I’ve opened a fresh box in that damnable place only to find that something had chewed its way in from below and made off with the goods. Weren’t rats did that, now, was it?”
That brought silence, even from Clow and Kierney. There was no explanation of God nor man, Sherily told them in a grim, deep voice. For under the North Burial Grounds there were great passages and tunnels, the barrows of some devil that devoured corpses and polished its teeth on human bone. Some malignant grave-crawler worming in the earth and the North Grounds was its lair.
“Yes, them tunnels below… and before you think I’m filled with a mule’s own shit, dare I mention the name of Arnie McKellan? Old Arnie who was rifling graves when the lot of you were still pissing your knickers?”
That was not a name any wanted mentioned.
McKellan was in the Glasgow Lunatic Asylum and no doubt would be for the remainder of his days. Sherily went over his story once again. How he’d been found one morning in the North Burial Grounds, drooling and gibbering and laughing. Claimed he had opened a grave and as he got his stout hands on the coffin of a recently interred young woman, the box had been pulled from his fingers into a black hole beneath.