Legion of the Dead (7 page)

There sounded, by my right ear, a
pop
like a cork flying from a champagne bottle. The tube had broken free of the valve on the helmet and the breathing-hood suddenly began to fill with water.

I gulped in a last mouthful of air and
then struck out for the surface, fighting the weight of the brass helmet – a moment earlier, the means of survival; now the cause of peril. Those moments in the dark waters of the harbour, being swept away on a current and fighting to get to the surface, were the longest of my life and, as the salt water rose in the helmet, filling my ears and stinging my eyes, I truly believed that they were to be my last.

Then, after a seeming lifetime of flailing, kicking, spluttering effort, my feet connected with a deep shelf of shingle. I clawed my way up it in a rattling avalanche of pebbles, the heavy helmet pressing down on my shoulders and my head ready to explode.

All at once, the helmet burst through the surface of the water and I found myself peering through the fogged glass at the shore. Dragging my exhausted body the last few yards, I made it up out of the
shallows and collapsed in a heap on the mud, water draining out of the helmet like ale from an upturned –

‘The Gatling Sump,’ I whispered. ‘Of all places …’

Just beyond the sewer-opening was a place I thought I’d never have to set foot in again. Now, I realized, I had little choice. The graveyard lay between me and the jetty at Riverhythe – towards which, no doubt, a shocked and distraught professor was rowing with all his might.

I could have taken the long way round, back towards the Belvedere Mile and through the warehouses of Gatling Quays, but I was a tick-tock lad – wet, bedraggled and half-drowned, but a tick-tock lad nonetheless. I didn’t take the long way round. I took short cuts, and the shortest cut of all was through Adelaide Graveyard.

I made my way along the black railings, went through the cemetery gates and was
striding between the dark silent gravestones, when a sound made me stop in my tracks.

It was the sound of a tinkling bell …

T
here it was again, faint but unmistakable. Somewhere in Adelaide Graveyard, a finger-chain was ringing a headstone bell. I stopped and peered about me at the eerie array of gravestones, tomb slabs and memorial statuary that stretched away into the mist.

The bell sounded again.

Perhaps some nocturnal animal – a wharf rat or feral cat – had become entangled in the chain and was simply struggling to break free. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate.

I stumbled on through the graveyard, scanning the headstones around me as I went,
hoping desperately that I was right and that this was a false alarm. A new burial with a finger-chain and bell was meant to be watched over for anything up to six days, depending on the fee. As the bell continued to ring, I fully expected a licensed gravewatcher, spade in hand, to emerge from the sentry box I was rapidly approaching through the mist. But when I got there, the box was deserted, and the brazier in front of it unlit and stone-cold.

Looking up, I glimpsed the tall tenement building of Adelaide Mansions overlooking the far side of the graveyard. A single square of light on the left of its dark façade showed that Ada Gussage’s rooms were the only ones still occupied.

I shivered violently, and winced as the dull ache in my left arm became more insistent. A wave of nausea washed over me and I crouched, head between my knees, to wait for it to pass. Blood was thumping in my head and I felt
suddenly hot and feverish – but the feeling of sickness passed.

Straightening up, my Neptune suit creaking like a carriage horse’s harness, I continued on through Adelaide Graveyard. Out of the swirling mist, the stony-eyed angels on the grander tombs and gravestones stared down at me impassively, their spreading wings strangely menacing in the moonlight.

I felt light-headed and dizzy, but the intense darts of pain which now shot up my arm jolted me back to reality. I had to get to Riverhythe.

The bell sounded again, close now, and as it did so, I stumbled and lost my balance, pitching forward onto a wet, grassy mound, the diving helmet tumbling from my grasp. I twisted round, groaning as the pain in my injured arm flared like a phosphorus match, to find my feet entangled in a funeral wreath, its splendid blooms withered to a tangle of twigs and blackened flower heads. A sodden ribbon
trailed across the grass, gold letters on crimson –
To our beloved boss. Gone but not forgotten. The Sumpside Boys
. The words shimmered in front of my eyes and my head began to swim.

With a low moan, I sank back, another wave of nausea breaking over me. The frosty dew-filled grass felt wonderfully cool and, as I pressed my feverish face against it, I began to feel a little better.

Just then, the bell sounded directly above me.

Turning my head to the side, I opened one eye. Silvery moonlight glinted on a crook-like pole, a taut metal chain and, at its end, a small copper bell hesitantly swinging to and fro. I looked up. The inscrutable eyes of the stone angel at the top of the gravestone stared down at me. Beams of moonlight crossed the shiny black granite surface, momentarily picking out the letters engraved upon it.

EDWIN “FIREJAW” O’ROURKE
, I read.

“
Cruelly taken from this World in his 52nd
year
.

A mighty red-maned lion amongst men
,
The Quays shall not see his like again.”

The bell suddenly stopped ringing, and with it, my heart seemed to skip a beat. There was no animal caught in the finger-chain. It ran unbroken from the headstone bell down into the ground, some six feet or more, to the metal ring on Firejaw O’Rourke’s dead finger …

I lay there, paralysed with fear, my feverish head pressed into the cool dew-soaked grass. And then I heard it, almost imperceptible at first, the faintest of faint scratching.

As I listened, the scratching grew louder, turning to a hideous scraping, clawing sound. Suddenly, beneath me, the ground began to tremble. With a raw, choking cry of terror, I threw myself back as the grassy turf erupted, inches from where my head had been.

A massive clenched hand – every nail and
knuckle embedded with mud – burst up from the ground, followed closely by a second, sending a hail of mud and earth high in the air. As I watched, transfixed by the horror of the scene, the grave before me burst open, clods of earth, splintered coffin wood and blackened funeral wreaths flying in all directions.

A great dark shape heaved itself out of the debris and rose to its feet like some wilderness bear roused from hibernation. It stood with its back to me, head bowed towards the marble headstone, as if reading the epitaph.

Trembling uncontrollably, I began to back away on hands and knees, the Neptune suit creaking and squeaking with every movement. The dark, silver-tinged clouds overhead parted, and the graveyard was bathed in moonlight. Slowly, Firejaw O’Rourke turned to face me.

The Emperor’s fine funeral clothes – embroidered jacket and intricately pleated cravat;
black-and-white checked breeches with the padded yellow cummerbund tight around a great sagging gut – were crumpled and smeared in dark mud. A gold ring glistened on the index finger of one massive hand, the finger-chain now ripped free, and a sickly-sweet cloying smell filled the air that was the unmistakable odour of rotting flesh.

Slowly, Firejaw O’Rourke turned to face me
.

But it wasn’t these details that seared themselves into my memory so that even now, when I think of it, I break out in a cold sweat. No, it was the sight that greeted me when Firejaw O’Rourke turned his face towards mine.

On those ghastly features, etched into the decaying flesh, was the awful history of the Emperor of Gatling Quays’ death; a boatload of exploding fireworks and the murky waters of the harbour. Burned and drowned, Firejaw stared down at me through one white, sightless eye. The left-hand side of his face was bloodless, with mottled blue blotches and a
greenish hue to the lips and cheek. His great beard, flecked with mud, blazed a reddish ginger, made even more vivid by the colourless features above.

On the right side of his face, the red beard had been burned away and the skin hung down his cheek and neck in looped waxen ribbons, clinkers and ashes embedded in the formless mass. The lips were blistered and fused together on one side. The right ear had melted completely and, with the molten skin now set without it, it was impossible to see where once it had been. As for the nose, the left-hand side was intact, but the right half had been eaten away by flames to reveal the dark cavity beneath, bone-edged and blackened.

As the Emperor of Gatling Quays towered over me, the mist seemed to thicken, along with the insistent thumping of blood in my temples and the searing pain shooting up my arm. I fell back and shut my eyes, willing the nightmare to end. The stench of rotting flesh
grew stronger. Pebbles and earth peppered me as silken coat-tails brushed past my cheek, accompanied by heavy ponderous footfalls and a soft squelching sound, like overripe fruit being crushed underfoot.

When I opened my eyes, I was lying in front of an empty grave, strewn with funereal wreckage. The stone angel – wings spread wide – gazed down at me through the mist and, in my feverish half-crazed state, I thought I saw a shudder pass through its body and ruffle its feathers.

That was enough for me. Grasping the professor’s precious breathing-hood, I clambered to my feet and blundered through the graveyard, towards the glowing streetlamps by the entrance gate in the distance – and escape.

My head was swimming. What had I just seen? Firejaw O’Rourke had been dead and buried two weeks earlier, and yet hadn’t I just witnessed the Emperor of Gatling Quays
digging himself out of his own grave?

I had read of such things happening in the distant islands of the Indies in
Crockford’s Journal of the Unnatural
during my studies at Underhill’s Library for Scholars of the Arcane. But here, in the city, in Gatling Quays …?

My mind racing, I reached a pool of yellow light at the graveyard gate, only to feel a hand on my shoulder. With a yelp of terror, I pulled free, the diving helmet raised above my head ready to smash down into Firejaw O’Rourke’s hideous face.

‘Lawks-a-mussy!’ exclaimed Ada Gussage, pulling her dark woollen shawl round her heavy shoulders and pushing her big red face into mine. ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost …’