Johannes Cabal The Necromancer (6 page)

They are of no concern here.

Those who do want their bodies interred have different visions of how they’d prefer the environs, as if it would make a difference to them at this juncture. Some imagine a green churchyard on a spring day, the sound of bells calling the faithful to worship, the immaculate grass verges, the white pebbled paths. Some—usually the ones who wear a lot of black and think that Byron must have been mad, bad, and fabulous to know—dream of tenebrous graveyards in the shades of monstrous Gothic churches, beneath a dark, lowering sky that threatens thunder and lightning any second. Being near a mountainous sea wouldn’t hurt, either. Others would like a tree to be planted over their otherwise unmarked graves, so that their bodies might nourish the roots of a mighty oak or sycamore.

All these desires can be understood and to a greater or lesser extent sympathised with. It is, however, impossible to have the faintest idea what was going through the minds of the people who bought plots in the Grimpen Burial Ground. Perhaps they hated their relatives and wanted to drag them into one of the ugliest and most depressing places on Earth, if only for the funeral.

The Grimpen Burial Ground stood—if that is the right word, and “lay” if it is not—in the heart of the last marsh in the land that, until recently, contained malaria. No effort had been necessary to wipe out the last of the disease-carrying anopheles mosquitoes; they simply seemed to give up the will to live.

The burial ground itself had been cunningly placed on the head of a peninsula that could be safely reached only by traversing a long and serpentine isthmus surrounded on all sides by a sucking bog of the sort that makes frequent appearances in adventure stories. None could guess how many arch-criminals, diabolical Gypsies, and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know had breathed their last, frantic, gasping breaths before vanishing beneath the clinging filth. It was likely to be a fair few.

Then onwards, along the winding, desperate path, until one reached the burial ground’s rusting gates. Predictably, one hung from a single hinge and screeched eerily, given the excuse of the faintest breeze. And in the Grimpen Burial Ground, breezes never got stronger than faint, for anything stronger might perhaps have made headway in shifting the mists. That would never do. People talk about the London pea-soupers, but although those legendary fogs may have been yellow, unhealthy, and thick enough to bottle, they had absolutely no class. The Grimpen mists, in contrast, had style to spare. They drifted slowly and enigmatically, eldritch and eerie, ever encroaching, enveloping all. They had the air of watching and waiting. People hated attending burials there; the mists, the infamous mists, seemed to be watching the living. And waiting for them to die.

Yet the burial ground was closed because it was full. Full of the dead that people wanted to forget. The malevolent fathers and the bastard sons, the insane mothers and the diseased daughters. They came, one and all, in their coffins of bare pine or fashioned teak, to be interred in this distant place and conveniently allowed to slip the memories of the people who stood, dry-eyed, by their yawning graves. Some of the last resting places were marked with ornate gravestones of exotic marble or hard granite brought from far away. Others, less wealthy or less hypocritical, marked the sites of the less-than-dearly departed with local slate, cheap limestone, or even wood. Loathed magnate and embarrassing heir by the second under-stairs maid lay side by side, their gravestones sagging in the moist soil, united by the simple fact that no living human heart had any place for them.

For all that, however, the burial ground wasn’t quite filled. In the rear of the burial ground, overlooking the bogland at the farthest point from the gates, there was one place that lay only partially occupied. It was the one and only family crypt to be found there, and its story is an extraordinary one.

The Druin family could follow its line back to the Norman invasion; their name was presumed to be a corruption of “de Rouen,” although there was no evidence that they originally came from that place. Their ancestor’s role in the invasion is open to interpretation. The family claimed that he rode at William the Conqueror’s side because he was a trusted aide and confidant. In light of their more recent and documented history, it has been mooted that William was simply keen to keep an eye on him. Whatever the truth of it, it is fact that the family was granted a plot of land for perpetuity, a plot that included the bogland that the burial ground now stood upon.

The family muddled through the centuries, frequently backing the wrong horse in a multitude of conflicts yet always managing to get onto the winning side at the last through some dazzling act of treachery. Richard III is rumoured to have known he was doomed when the Druin’s defection to the House of Lancaster actually during the battle was reported to him. He made some comment about rats and sinking ships before going off to look for his horse.

From the Plantagenet years onwards, the Druins were said to be capable of swapping from Protestant to Roman Catholic and back again within the period of a single church service. Indeed, a secret library discovered during renovations of Druin Manor contained a copy of the catechism; the Bible in Greek, Latin, and English; a treatise on Calvinism; the Koran; the Tripitaka; and an Arabic book bound in curious leather that was later stolen by a gang consisting of an antiquarian, a mobster, and a woman with a lisp.

The family managed to maintain a place in court throughout many changes until the Industrial Revolution happened along and they discovered that they could make more money the nouveau-riche way. Mills and railways were heavily invested in, children sent down mines, the word “philanthropy” carefully crossed out in the family dictionary; the Druins became richer and richer and richer.

It was about then that the effects of great wealth and a small gene pool started to spell their doom. Inbreeding, largely imposed upon them by a world that put too much store in bad reputations, started to strip the gears of their collective sanity. They became madder and madder and madder, and they never did so cheaply.

Beatrice built the Museum of the Legume, housing the world’s largest collection of peas. Horace excavated an inversion of the Palace of Westminster, a huge jelly mould of the Mother of Parliaments. Jeremy formed a hunt of foxes with which he used to go beagle-hunting before moving up a level and storming people’s houses with a troop of crack badgers.

The atmosphere of mutual loathing and unilateral insanity became almost palpable. Aunt Sophia, the only one to maintain a marble count in double figures, went abroad in a determined attempt to find some curative Measure.

Apparently, she failed. Yet she came back, after years of travel, curiously calmed and tolerant, perhaps even a little smug.

Her first action on her return was to create the Grimpen Burial Ground and have the Druin family crypt built in its most inaccessible corner. Every surviving member of the family had a place allocated, with the sole exception of Sophia herself. Asked why, she replied with grim satisfaction that if she had learned anything in her travels, it was that the family could never hope to lose the taint of madness and was doomed to extinction. As to why she had no place reserved in the crypt, it was because she would survive them all.

The rest of the family looked at one another significantly. Mad or not, they needed no weatherman to tell them how the wind blew.

Sophia’s luck suddenly seemed to leave her. She suffered a series of accidents, all of them fatal. Several times she was declared dead, as misfortune—sometimes embodied as a plummeting sack of concrete, sometimes as some other heavy, fast item that had coincidentally happened to cross her path at head height—dogged her every step.

By a striking happenstance, the rest of the family was always some distance away when misfortune struck—heavily—and always had cast-iron alibis, sometimes typed up days in advance. Yet Sophia would inevitably sit up on the mortuary slab, stretch, and ask what time tea was.

Ultimately, however, she was overtaken by a particularly unfortunate accident that brought together a steamroller, Sophia, and almost four tons of gelignite at the same time and the same place. This time there was no possibility of any requests for elevenses during the post-mortem. Aunt Sophia was taken down from the trees, scraped off the road, and plucked from the surface of the duck pond with shrimping nets, placed with all due ceremony in her favourite hip bath along with her favoured bathtime accoutrements, and interred in the darkest corner of the family crypt. And that was that. For very nearly two months.

Then, one morning, the surviving family woke up and found themselves one short for breakfast. They discovered Beatrice tied by her ankles to the chandelier. Her expression was one of purest horror, and she was quite dead. There were a lot of peas in the room. The post-mortem discovered another five pounds of them forced down her throat, jamming her oesophagus shut and clogging her airways. A month later, Jeremy’s head appeared on a plaque in the trophy room. A fortnight after that, Horace’s shattered body was found at the peak of the inverse Westminster Tower, some three hundred feet below the surrounding ground.

One by one they died, apparently at the hands of somebody who knew all their little foibles very well indeed. Felix died beneath a menhir. Daphne drowned in aspic. Given Julian’s favourite pastime, it’s perhaps just as well that they never found the lower half of his body. Quickly the Druin crypt filled.

If only somebody had thought to check Aunt Sophia in her hip bath. If only somebody had cared to investigate where she’d been during her years abroad. If only somebody had made enquiries into the sudden outbreak of childhood anaemia in the area. Ah, the mysterious “Grimpen Plague.” No child died from the disease, and any that moved away for their health quickly improved. The doctors were baffled.

If they had compared notes more carefully, they might have been intrigued by another curious trait that all the child victims shared. All had suffered the same nightmare the night the sickness had taken hold. All had dreamt of a dark, grimy room, like a cellar or a gaol, with deep recesses in the wall. All had found themselves compelled to walk to a corner where the room turned into a dingy alcove. In that forsaken place they had been surprised to find an old-fashioned hip bath. Then, before their terror-stricken gaze, they realised that there was somebody sitting there, a pale old woman with cruel, hypnotic eyes and an expression of such bottomless hunger that they whined and keened at the memory of it. They hadn’t been able to move, or to run, as the woman rose from the bath and advanced on them, slowly and surely, with horrible inevitability, like some great albino spider. “The Loofah Lady! The Loofah Lady!” they screamed.

Even after the last of the Druin family had vanished into the crypt, the anaemia outbreak continued. For years it was assumed that the bogland was unhealthy, and those parents who could afford it sent their children away until they were old enough to “resist” the “disease.” Meanwhile, the burial ground slowly filled with the discarded dead that nobody wanted. When it became full, it was curtly abandoned. Time began to crumble the place back into the ground.

Nobody would visit that place unless he absolutely had to. Even the most cynical and laudanum-crazed poet could think of a lot of things that he’d rather do than sit on one of the burial ground’s tombs and compose a sonnet. Even a haiku would require more time than felt comfortable.

So the ugly and forsaken place was forgotten, and the “anaemic plague” continued.

Until, that is, about eight years ago.

Johannes Cabal stepped past the ruined gates and looked around speculatively. The burial ground had deteriorated quite visibly in the eight years since he’d last been here. Nor were there any signs that the place had been visited in the interim. This didn’t surprise him in the slightest. The gravestones leaned a little more crazily, the moss had encroached a little farther across the stonework, and it would take time with a wire brush and oblique lighting to read the inscriptions on anything. Of signs of any human interference, however, there were none at all. Good, he thought. That would remove further variables from what already stood to be a tricky business. He hefted the carpetbag he held in his left hand and moved on. The crow bobbed around on his shoulder, its gaze flicking this way and that. An air of wariness hung about it; it didn’t like this place at all.

Cabal wended his way through the stones and the high tufts of grass, proceeding as directly as he could to the Druin family vault. As he walked, he remembered his early studies on the nature of life, of death, and of something in between. Studies that had brought him to this place and finished with him, if not running, certainly walking quickly back down the causeway.

Distracted by his memories, he tripped over something lost in the long grass and staggered briefly—the crow flapping fantastically—before recovering his balance. Turning back, he opened the shutter on his dark lantern to find what had tripped him. An inexpressive man by nature, he still raised an eyebrow and mouthed a quiet “Oh.”

It was an old army-surplus field-telephone box, its wooden box in an advanced state of decay, and he did not care to touch it. The Bakelite handset lay discarded by it, and the telephone wire itself led, Cabal discovered after a moment’s investigation, down into a tomb whose lid had been slightly moved. Cabal distantly remembered seeing this box on his last visit. He pursed his lips and straightened up. The abandoned field telephone doubtless had some weird tale associated with it, but he really didn’t have the time or the inclination to find out what. He had come here with a mission and could countenance no distraction. He turned once more towards the Druin vault and walked on.

The vault was mainly underground, sealed against the high-water table by superior craftsmanship and a lot of lead. Above the surface, the entrance was a small, utilitarian structure not unlike a coal shed with Gothic pretensions. Its only features of note were the name DRUIN in large roman capitals over the door, and the door itself, an impressive feature of stone plates held together with anodised iron straps. Cabal was more concerned with the lock. The door’s own internal lock had been destroyed in the past by an amateurish attempt to pick it. It had originally been backed up with a huge padlock running through hasps anchored firmly to the surface, but this lock lay partially concealed by the unwholesome scrub grass that grew in clumps around the area. Cabal didn’t need to look at it to know it had been laboriously cut through with a hacksaw. In its place was a gleaming padlock of stainless steel. He hefted it with one hand and slid back the sliding keyhole cover with his thumb. It moved easily: the whole lock seemed in pristine condition, despite its years in such damp conditions. There were no signs of tampering. Cabal took a key ring from his pocket with his free hand and selected a small key. He placed it in the keyhole and slowly turned it. He was aware of every sliding piece of metal within the padlock’s case as the key turned slowly and with no impediment through a full circle. The click of the lock releasing was barely perceptible. Cabal was quietly pleased with it as he gently disengaged it from the hasp and put it into his pocket. It pays to invest in quality, he thought.