Dark Screams, Volume 6 by Dark Screams-Volume 6 # (v5.0)

Author:Dark Screams-Volume 6 # (v5.0) [#, Dark Screams-Volume 6]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

5

They had a rare run of luck not three days later. Over at the workhouse on the east side of the city no less than fifteen had died in the span of a few days. An outbreak of cholera had done them in, the price to be paid for using and reusing the same contaminated water. Kierney wasn’t taken with the idea of fishing those corpses. To his way of thinking, cholera was an infectious, communicable disease. But Clow assured him that there was nothing to worry on, that cholera died with its owner and such was a medically proven fact. The dead had been placed in a single communal pauper’s grave, so they could make short work of it.

So, in the dead of night, they descended on St. Bartholomew’s Churchyard and got down to work. Limned by thin moonlight, spades sinking into the moist, fresh earth, they went at it. All around them, graves and stones and shadows slinking. The sound of crickets and peepers calling out.

“Least it’s not raining,” Clow said and grunted, tossing black shovelfuls of earth onto the canvas sheet. “Don’t think I could take another night of that creeping damp. Got right inside me, it did.”

“Aye, disgusting, it was. Ground still pissing like a sponge. Heavy, this earth is.”

The city had been flooded and the streets were mud. A mud swimming with the filth of an overcrowded population. Not just water and dirt, but seepage from backed-up sewers, the combined waste of emptied privy pails, offal from the slaughteryards, and polluted runoff from the river. The mud had become a seething organic brew of feces, urine, blood, and contaminated groundwater. A ripe and heady breeding ground for contagious disease. Epidemics of typhus, cholera, and scarlet fever had filled the graveyards. Some were so full that old graves were opened, the disinterred dead and their attendant coffins were burned in huge pyres, nauseating clouds of black stink rising above the city. Hundreds of cadavers were packed into aboveground vaults where they were rotting en masse, the noxious drainage of which was further polluting the soil and ultimately the water drawn from hand pumps. The stench created was hideous, lying over certain dim, dire quarters of the city in a fetid shroud.

This was the city and the times Clow and Kierney moved through. A seething, crowded hell with no conception of sanitation. An age of child labor and epidemics, of rivers congested with sewage and carrion, of streets packed with refuse, the living and quite often the dead. A time when rancid meat was sold openly, as was the flesh of diseased cattle. Medicine was slowly making progress via the anatomists, but the old ways and grim traditions hung heavy. Prescriptions from doctors still called for spiderwebs, human blood, frogs, insects, and very often the excrement of horses and pigs. With the old practitioners, there was a fine line between healing and witchery, superstition and cure.

“Hit something, I have,” Kierney said, withdrawing the blade of his shovel, grimacing in the flickering lamplight.

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