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.