Legion of the Dead by Paul Stewart

Author:Paul Stewart [Stewart, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780375895364
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2008-04-01T18:30:00+00:00

Back in my attic rooms, I collapsed into my old armchair and studied the Daily Chronicle. I must admit, my hands were shaking as I scanned the column of small print. It seemed that Firejaw O’Rourke was merely the latest victim of a spate of outrages in cemeteries and graveyards all over town. Ada Gussage had said as much when I ran into her in Adelaide Graveyard, though I had been too spooked and full of lamprey venom to take it in. Now, here it was in front of me in black and white.

The Chronicle was of the firm belief that this was the work of graverobbers, or resurrection men – a bunch of individuals so reviled and disreputable that not even the denizens of Gatling Quays would admit to having anything to do with them. Apparently, the corpses they stole ended up on marble slabs in underground dissecting theatres, where students of anatomy would pay handsomely to study them.

You could make a pretty penny from a recently buried corpse. The fresher the body, the higher the price the unscrupulous surgeon would be prepared to pay, no questions asked – and all in the interests of scientific enquiry, of course.

The account in the Daily Chronicle, so measured and plausible, seemed to confirm the professor’s theory, and I wanted to believe that the ghastly apparition I’d seen in the graveyard was indeed a figment of my imagination brought to vivid life by the venom of an exotic sea creature. Perhaps all I’d really seen was an empty grave, ransacked by graverobbers. The rest was simply a terrible hallucination, just as he had said. Yes, I really did want to believe him – yet it had all seemed so real that doubt still gnawed at the back of my mind …

Just then, there came a light tap-tap at the window and I looked up to see Will Farmer peering through the grimy glass. I beckoned for him to come in. He pushed the window open and dropped down lightly to the floor.

‘Barnaby, where have you been?’ he said. ‘I was beginning to—’ His gaze fell on the sling and a look of concern crossed his face. ‘What happened?’

‘Pull up a chair, Will,’ I said, ‘it’s a long story.’ I shook my head. ‘A story which I’m still trying to get straight in my own mind. Some of it is pretty hard to believe …’

‘Try me,’ he said.

And so I recounted the strange events that had taken place over the previous couple of days. Will listened attentively, his eyes growing wider and wider as I described my trip out into the harbour and the underwater battle with the black-scaled lamprey. And when I got to the incident in the graveyard, he jumped back so violently I thought he was going to tumble from his chair.

‘Unbelievable,’ he gasped.

‘I know, Will, I know,’ I said. ‘The professor says the poison from the lamprey’s bite affected my mind, made me see things.’

‘So Firejaw O’Rourke didn’t rise from the grave?’ asked Will, his voice little more than a whisper.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.