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.”