The Edinburgh Dead

Melville Street

John Ruthven stalked the empty, cold corridors and rooms of his great house like a caged, waning beast in some vastly inhospitable menagerie. It was a ruin, in many ways; all ways that mattered, save its fabric. Or a graveyard. That, perhaps, was the more apt description. So much had turned to dust within these walls. The fortune come down to him, dwindled now to a meagre rump. His marriage, though that had never been a thing of great consequence to him, for he had seen the cracks running through it before the ardours of the wedding bed had even run their course. The dreams and possibilities that had seemed close enough to touch as he delved ever deeper into the secret truths none before him had uncovered.

He went from darkened room to darkened room on the uppermost floor of the house. He carried no light, for the darkness suited him. He stared at the empty walls, the innumerable absences.

In the room Durand had until recently occupied he kicked half-heartedly at the box of unread, and now unreadable, clay tablets. What secrets might they hold that could have moved him on, taken him further? He would never know, without the Frenchman to stand as intermediary between him and the ancient priests and magicians whose explorations they recorded.

He left Durand’s room and stood at the top of stairs, staring up at the stars that glimmered through the wide skylight. A thousand eyes, watching him. Waiting for him to uncover the truth of the fires that lit them, and all things.

A tremor of sound, from deep down in the house beneath him. Ruthven held his breath, tilted his head a fraction. It did not come again, but he was sure his ears had not deceived him. Glass breaking perhaps, or something brittle falling. He stood there, prey now to irritation and trepidation. It was not Isabel returning home, of that he was sure. It had not been that kind of brash sound. Shy, rather. Unmeant.

He could not tell where the sound had come from, but the inspirited corpse that remained locked in the cellar had become restive these last few days. Since Blegg’s disappearance, in fact. It might be that the bonds between the meat and the force it carried were weakening, as they always did over time; or it might be that without Blegg, whose incantations played their part in calling the corpses into movement, something was going awry. In either case, it made Ruthven uneasy. He was unsure of his ability to calm or control the thing, should the need arise.

It was foolish even to keep it in the house, of course, but without aid—ideally from Blegg—he was not at all certain that he could destroy it. And there was Wallace’s corpse down there too, preserved in a barrel. Intended for the next experiment, which now might never take place. Blegg had killed the man, once they had abandoned Cold Burn Farm. It was distasteful, but the soundest course; they had no further need of his services, and he had seen far too much to be left to his own devices.

Ruthven went to the room he slept in. There was no bed, just a mattress laid on the floor, with heavy woollen blankets rumpled carelessly across it. A wardrobe, though, one of the last elegant reminders of how the whole house had once been furnished, and a few fine clothes within it. And a single tall mirror, standing on shapely carved legs.

In that glass, illuminated by cold moonlight, Ruthven glimpsed his own form and face; saw, in the sag of his shoulders and the limp brow, an unfamiliar despondency. The eyes looking back at him carried a doubt, the hint of folly grudgingly recognised, that made him turn away from the reflected visage.

He reached into the wardrobe and withdrew his cane-sword. An innocent thing, to all appearances, a walking stick made of Malacca wood with a plain but neatly formed metal grip at its head. It concealed a narrow, straight blade.

An oil lamp stood on the floorboards at the side of the mattress, its brass base and handle surmounted by a curving glass shade. Its flame guttered low, shedding almost no light. He turned the little wheel that would bring the lamp to life, and it chased the shadows from the room. Standing, he drew the sword slowly from its cane sheath. It had not been exposed to the air for years, and he had thought it might be stiff or stuck, but it came smoothly out and the lamplight laid soft yellow gleams out along its blade.

There was no further sound from below, but that silence did nothing to still his racing heart. He could think of no cause for the earlier disturbance that would be welcome. Isabel was almost never here now, keeping her own strange hours and telling him nothing of what she did. Treating him, in fact, with the contempt that had been for so long understood but not often so crudely expressed between them. He would have turned her out long ago, but for the need to preserve appearances. She, no doubt, would happily have gone of her own accord, once their funds were all but exhausted, save for Blegg. The perverse desire for him that had grown in her. Or been inflicted upon her by that presence inside Blegg. Ruthven did not know, or care, precisely how their corrupt union had come about.

Sword in one hand, lamp in the other, he went down the stairs. He trod as lightly as he could, but there was no carpeting on these upper flights, and the boards creaked beneath his feet no matter how much care he took.

He paused on the middle landing, peering over the banisters. There was nothing but darkness down there. His lamp set weaving, faltering patterns of soft light flowing over the walls. It merely accentuated the gloom in those parts it did not reach, and made the lurking shadows seem all the more impenetrable. Ruthven flexed his fingers about the hilt of the sword and resumed his cautious descent.

Every one of those he had relied upon in his enterprise had betrayed him. If he was guilty of folly, it was surely in that reliance as much as anything. They had come so close, after all; breathed life into the dead, performed an alchemy of souls. Yet he had become not the conqueror of death but its transmuter, giving it movement and vigour, but not sentience. He had not returned the departed to their bodily shells, but instead replaced them with raw, formless spirits whose nature he did not understand.

Except Blegg, of course. What Ruthven had instilled in Blegg’s corpse was of different substance. It was a soul, indisputably. An old, immutable presence that brought with it appetites and insights and whispered memories and promises. Now, though, Ruthven began to doubt whether he had even called forth what resided in Blegg’s form in the first place. It may be that it had come of its own accord.

He had killed Blegg with his own hands. Strangled him. His submissive, obedient thrall, aghast at the wonders Carlyle’s machines and Ruthven’s magical knowledge performed upon the corpses of dogs, had discovered an unwonted courage. Threatened all manner of scandal. And thus became the first human subject for Ruthven’s experiments. It had seemed a triumph of sorts at the time. Perhaps that had been illusion, Ruthven dully thought.

Down to the entrance hallway he went. Still there was no further sound other than that which he made himself. The ornate mirror standing on the side table caught the light of his lamp. Shadows spun around the walls as he turned. Perhaps it was imagination, but he thought he felt the slightest drift of cold air, easing its way through from the rear of the house. He made to go that way, back towards the kitchen, but stopped. He heard a single, muted scrape, the movement of one thing against another. Brief, almost inaudible.

He went to the top of the dark stairway that led down into the cellars. It had come from down there, that whisper. The door to the store room in which all his secrets were stowed was locked. The walking corpse within should not have been able to escape it; yet they were strong, those things, and unpredictable.

Heart sinking at what he might find, Ruthven went down. The darkness fled before him, swirling away into the corners and edges. He stepped out from the stair, and found himself looking down the muzzle of the pistol Adam Quire was pointing at his chest.

Three weeks, Quire had waited, until his ankle was strong again. All of it under Cath’s attentive care.

He had come to loathe the Holy Land: the stink of it, and the noise, and the secret delinquencies practised behind its every door. But he had few choices, and Cath was there. Emma Slight had grown ever less happy at her extended eviction to make room, and peace, for Quire, but the Widow made sure her frustrations went no further than bitter looks, should she and Quire happen to pass on the stair. Mary Coulter gave Quire her protection, and that did not sit well with him, but he needed it and took it. She found it amusing, he suspected, to have him there, dependent upon her goodwill.

He and Cath had barely a penny between them, for he had no wage and she, to his unbounded relief, would not work while he was sharing her rooms. They ate sparsely, and drank hardly at all, which was for neither of them an entirely easy abstinence.

Yet it was a strangely happy time. Quire found a certain contentment within him, that was invulnerable to the vicissitudes of each day. It was a still, quiet thing settled into his breast founded upon the sense that he could not choose how this fragment of his life would end, and thus simply let it carry him along and took from it what comfort it offered. He was upon an island, having come out of the stormy sea, and would shortly descend once more into the chaos of rough waters, but for now he was ashore, and not alone.

He could have brought in a decent bit of funds by selling his French pistol and sabre, but those he would not part with, for he knew he would likely have a use for them yet.

“I’ve not treated you well,” Quire murmured, laying a soft kiss on Cath’s brow one night in the bed. “You’d no need to take me in here. I’ve not earned it.”

“No, but I’m a saint,” Cath whispered.

She stroked his neck.

“You’re a rare breed, then.” Quire smiled.

“We all are, aren’t we? There’s not a one of us so alike to another to be called the same. Not when you look proper close.”

“Maybe that’s true.”

Quire rolled, and stretched out an arm to snuff the candle by the bed. The flame vanished between his blunt fingertips, and he felt only the faintest sting of its heat as it departed. The room fell into darkness, so that he could not see her eyes or her hair any more, only feel her skin against his.

“One more thing I’ve got to do,” he said quietly, “and then, with luck, I’m a free man.”

“You’re a free man now.”

“Not quite. I’ve not settled with all those need the settling, not yet. And I’ll have no peace until that’s done. Not from them, not from myself. Once a thing like this is begun, you have to see it through to the finish, or someone else will, and that’s when a man dies. When he lets someone else do the finishing.”

“Hush,” Cath whispered. “Hush.”

And she dispelled the future with just that word, and made it unreal. She chose the present, for both of them, and tied him into it. She closed his lips with a kiss.

So Quire went to Melville Street, to finish it. He had come without knowing precisely what would happen, and that did not trouble him greatly. War had taught him that the world, and whatever fates governed it, did not treat lightly those who thought they knew what was to come. He went because he knew that if he did not, someone would come for him, or no one would; and that latter chance was little better than the first, for if nothing changed he would live for ever in the company of fearful expectation.

He went in through the back of the house, from the dingy lane there. He had looked down the length of Melville Street first, and seen no light in the windows of Ruthven’s house. There were works on the pavements, holes dug for the setting up of gas lamps down the whole length of the street. Some of them stood there already, an abbreviated row of black iron columns, not yet ready to throw out their fierce illumination, but waiting patiently for the new age they were inheriting and fostering to call them into life. The workers had gone home, or gone to their drinking dens. A solitary watchman remained, sitting far down the road on a pile of lifted paving stones. The columns of gas lamps lay in the roadway beside him, like felled trees, roped off and watched over by this one guardian. He wore a thick coat, its collar turned up against the cold night, and had his hat pulled down hard over his head. His lantern put a yellowish tinge over him.

There was little other activity on the street. One or two couples going quietly home. A single drunken gentleman, veering this way and that in his intermittent progress down the pavement, his top hat tilted at an unpromising angle on his head, his walking cane tucked under his arm. Little activity, but still entirely too much for what Quire had in mind, so he went down the dark lane on stealthy feet, and stood listening at the door to Ruthven’s kitchens.

Not a sound. The whole house, rising up above him in its skin of great sandstone blocks, was quite still and silent. Quire knocked in a pane of glass in the nearest window, doing it as gently as he could with the handle of his pistol wrapped in a scarf. It still sounded loud, the thud of the blow and the brittle shatter and spill of glass splinters, but he waited a while longer in the shadows, and no answer came from within. He reached through the broken pane, turned the latch on the window and pushed up its lower half. He pulled himself through, and down on to the stone floor of the kitchen. Glass that had fallen there cut his hand, but he paid it no heed.

The cellar, Durand had said. That was where the truth lay. Perhaps, if he still lived, it was where Blegg lay. Quire went quickly, on the balls of his feet through into the main hallway. The stretch of carpet running down its centre muffled his footsteps. He passed the drawing room where he had first met Ruthven and the others. A hint of light fell from the skylight far above, just a pale blush of the moon. Quire was interested in the narrow stairs leading down into darkness, not the broad, noble flights that rose towards the stars.

The silence of the house, though welcome, was unnerving. It felt heavy, cavernous, as if the place had stood empty and unloved for years. The building had a cold indifference to it. Quire went down into its underbelly with a tightening unease in his breast.

There was only the barest thread of light there, following him down the stairway. He stood still, letting his eyes educate themselves in the gloom, and saw the curve of the ceiling, the rough brickwork of the walls. The emptiness, for there was nothing here. He went cautiously along a narrow, low passageway, looking into one bare room after another, each darker than the last, until he could see almost nothing, and tell only by the still, cold air and the sound of his own breathing that the place was abandoned. Until he came to a heavy door, locked.

Before he could test it, he heard footsteps, coming down to him out of the body of the house. Light was suddenly spilling out of the stairwell. He took a couple of quick paces closer, and levelled his pistol just in time to aim it at the breast of John Ruthven as he emerged into the basement.

Ruthven stared at him, mouth open and eyes wide with surprise.

“I’ve come to kill you,” Quire said. “Or bring you away with me to give full confession of your crimes.”

Ruthven held a long rapier of a blade in one hand, a flickering oil lamp in the other. He stared back at Quire dumbly.

“My inclination is to kill you,” Quire said honestly, “but I might find a reason not to. I’ll surely do it, though, if you don’t put that wee knife down.”

Ruthven looked down at the blade, hefted it in his hand.

“You don’t think much of my cane-sword, then, Mr. Quire? I paid a hefty price for it, long ago. Never had cause to use the thing.”

He dropped it, and it rang upon the hard floor.

“Is Blegg here?” Quire asked. “Anyone else?”

Ruthven shook his head.

“I don’t know where Mr. Blegg is. I’m rather glad to find you don’t either, mind you.”

“What’s his real name? The name of whatever it is walking around in his skin.”

“Ha. You have come a long way in your understanding, Mr. Quire, but even I cannot tell you that. He is what he is, and it has no name that I know of. A force of Nature, or of Hell, or of the human soul. I don’t know. He exists, that is all; perhaps he was always done so, wearing one form or another.”

“Weir’s amongst them.”

“Very good. Yes, Major Weir’s amongst them. Until they burned him out.”

“Come away from the stairs,” Quire said, giving the muzzle of his pistol a twitch.

Ruthven complied, but there was nothing meek in his manner. He seemed to Quire undismayed by being under the gun’s shadow.

“I want to see what’s behind this door back here,” Quire said.

“Do you?” said Ruthven with raised, almost mocking, eyebrows. “The key’s on a hook beside you.”

Quire dared a glance, and sure enough a heavy iron key hung on a rusty hook in the wall within his reach, revealed now by the light of Ruthven’s lamp.

“Open it for me,” Quire said.

“I am thinking of leaving Edinburgh, you know,” Ruthven said as he pushed the key into the lock. “Perhaps travel for a while, and put all this behind me.”

He twisted the key, seeming to struggle, as if the mechanism was stubbornly resisting him.

“Would that not suffice to rid me of you, Mr. Quire? I would dearly like to be rid of you.”

“And I you,” Quire grunted, “but no, it won’t suffice. Not for what happened to Wilson Dunbar. Not for all that you’ve done.”

“Ah, well,” sighed Ruthven, and the key turned in his hand and he pushed the door open.

He stepped back, holding the lamp up high, and extended his arm to invite Quire in.

“After you,” Quire said.

Ruthven did as he was told, and Quire followed him into the room. He had only a moment to take in the extraordinary display that greeted him. Shelves of stoppered jars and vases; a table laden with curving, bulbed glass vials with tubes extending from them like a beetle’s legs, and with bowls and tumblers and burners; another shelf holding a row of skulls. Boxes everywhere. Two huge barrels, covered over with a sheet. On a narrow bench against the wall, three tall stacks of metal discs laid one atop the other, with burnished copper rods attached to them.

All of that was glimpsed in the barest instant, for the only thing Quire truly saw was the tall man standing naked in the corner, his skin puckered and loose, his big hands entirely covered in illegible inscriptions, a horizontal slit in his chest as if a knife had been put in there. And dead eyes, falling upon Quire as the loathsome figure turned to look at him.

“Tell it to stand still,” Quire shouted.

He kept the pistol on Ruthven, though he yearned to turn it upon this naked monstrosity.

“Tell it to stand still,” he shouted again.

“Be still,” Ruthven said, and for the first time, Quire caught the quaver of nervousness in his voice.

The dead man took a step forward, lifting its long arms. Making fists of its hands, great cudgels of skin and bone and slack flesh.

“Be still,” Ruthven said more urgently, edging closer to Quire.

The naked figure rushed suddenly forwards. Quire snapped the pistol round and fired into its chest. The shot was deafening, shaking the air of that confined space. Quire’s target was so close that the pistol sprayed hot powder across the pallid skin, and he saw the black, burned hole the ball made in it. The monster staggered slightly sideways, but did not fall, and made of its imbalance a smooth, reaching movement. It seized the rim of one of those barrels with both hands and swung it up and around. It shattered one of the shelves as it came, scattering a thousand broken pieces of jar, and a multicoloured mist and rain of their contents.

Ruthven struggled to get past Quire to the doorway, trying to barge him aside. Quire fell backwards, out into the passage, Ruthven on top of him. The barrel came down and broke against the frame of the door, erupting into its constituent parts and releasing a great gush of stinking liquid and the corpse it contained.

Ruthven flailed atop Quire. The lamp went from his hand and burst against the wall of the passage, its oil taking light and burning over the bricks.

Quire cried out and threw Ruthven off him. The naked man was flinging aside the sundered staves of the barrel, dragging at the corpse that had fallen from it, all to clear a path out and into the passageway.

Ruthven rolled and ran for the stairs. Quire went after him, a stride or two behind, his useless pistol still clutched in his right hand. The dancing light of the burning oil picked out the blade of Ruthven’s discarded cane-sword, lying on the ground at the foot of the stairs. Quire snatched it up, and paused, just for a moment, to look back. The creature came out into the passageway, stepping over the outstretched leg of the corpse. As it did so, the vile slick of fluid that had vomited out of the barrel reached the patch of flame-crowned oil.

Quire threw his arm across his face as blinding light and a great fiery howl burst forth. A shooting sheet of flame raced back into the room, flooded around the naked man. Who ignored it entirely and ran at Quire.

Quire sprinted up the stairs into the hallway. He could hear Ruthven pounding up the main stairs.

“Ruthven,” he shouted, but his voice was all but drowned out by a booming explosion down in the cellar that shook the floor and almost made him lose his footing. A blast of hot air and flaming embers blew out of the mouth of the stairwell, and he backed away.

The hulking form of his pursuer came reeling out into the hall, patches of thick, burning ooze adhering to its back. It crashed into the opposite wall. It was between Quire and the kitchens. He might have been able to reach the massive front door of the house, but if it was locked, or if he was slow in getting it open, he would be pinned there. He followed Ruthven, up into the heights.

To the very top of the stairs, beneath the glass ceiling of the skylight and the starry sky beyond it. Ruthven threw himself at Quire, rushing from a room off to one side, pinning his sword arm against him, scrabbling for a hold around his neck. Trying, Quire realised at once, to throw or tumble him back down the steps into the path of the creature he could hear thundering up behind him.

It was a desperate last hope on Ruthven’s part, for strong as he was, he was no match to Quire’s solid bulk and breadth. Quire cracked his pistol against the side of Ruthven’s head, opening up a messy gash across his temple. He raked a heel down the man’s shin and as he wailed, Quire shrugged, lifted and turned him about. He hit him again in the head, and Ruthven’s hands came loose. Quire threw him off, and back into the arms of the naked brute that came rushing up to catch him.

Quire backed up, sword at the ready, thinking for a moment that he would now face the two of them, and no doubt die. But the dead man was not saving Ruthven. It seized him by his upper arms, and held him up high as it advanced, and shook him. Terribly, like a furious child punishing a rag doll. Ruthven’s head flailed about. He screamed. He was swung against the wall, once, twice.

The naked monster, its back still afire here and there, the stink of its skin and flesh burning filling the air, looked at Quire and advanced on him. It still held Ruthven with one hand, holding him up as easily as if he were weightless. Ruthven hung limp and unmoving in that grip, his feet dragging over the floorboards. But his eyes were open, and alive, and Quire saw the horror and terror in them.

Quire edged himself backwards along the landing. He had never in his life used a rapier, such as that he now held, but he had seen others wave them around in practice or show. Never in anger. The thing came quickly at him, hauling Ruthven along, reaching out for Quire with its free hand. He lunged forward and planted the tip of the sword into the breast, right beside the hole the pistol had already put there. Something in the way he did it was clumsy, for his weight did not pass through the blade as he had hoped; but it hardly mattered, for the movement and mass of the body into which it sank did the work for him.

The dead man shuddered, and swayed, and stumbled to one side. Quire whipped the sword back out of its flesh. He might have hit the heart, he thought; he was not sure. Ruthven was whimpering, or moaning; blood bubbled at his lips.

Quire heard the wooden railings along the landing groan as the huge figure fell against them. Its torso bent back for a moment, over the balustrade. Quire darted in again and stabbed the long blade upwards, into the exposed chin. It went up through the jaw and mouth and lodged somewhere in the bone of the skull. The creature spasmed, and it arched over the handrail into the deep space of the stairwell. The handrail cracked and split, the balusters splayed apart, and the creature fell backwards, pulling the sword from Quire’s hand and taking it down, jutting from its chin. Quire had one last glimpse of Ruthven’s rolling, anguished eyes, and then the man was snatched away and went plunging after his creation, his arm still locked in its iron grip.

By the time Quire reached the foot of the stairs, flames were already licking around the bodies. The hall carpet was alight, and the wallpaper on the walls nearest the cellar stairs was burning, coming away in black cindery sheets that swirled about and rose to be consumed in the roiling fire spreading itself across the ceiling.

The heat was too ferocious for Quire to get near the two twisted corpses, but he was not minded to do so anyway. Neither looked likely to rise again.

He ran to the front door and hauled it open, and rushed out into Melville Street, and away into the quiet Edinburgh night.