The Edinburgh Dead (39 page)

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.