“…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.