4

4

Across the Thames in Westminster, the clock tower chimed the quarters. Big Ben followed tolling the hour. Nine o’clock. The river lapped against the water stair. It was less foggy tonight, but the humid air was fraught with chill.

They stood on the Vauxhall Stairs adjacent to Lack’s Dock between the looming brick hulks of the Royal Flour Mills and a Gin and Vinegar distillery. The tide was in, the landing below the stair submerged. Descending beside the moss-covered wall, the slippery stone steps disappeared into the water, like an invitation to a drowning.

A crescent moon broke through the overcast and, for a minute, the river, the opposite embankment, the misty arc of the Vauxhall Bridge glowed like a luminous monochromatic painting. Then the moon retreated, plunging the river back into darkness.

“Now what?” Foley asked. He’d insisted on accompanying Will on his quest to capture a floater. Though Will would never admit it, he was glad of the company. It’d be nice to have someone pull the bogle off if one managed to get on top of you.

By way of answering, Will plunked another pebble into the water. When that didn’t draw attention, he looked around, found a chunk of broken cobblestone and lobbed it into the drink. It sank with a loud plunk accompanied by a spout of water that fell back into the river with a splash.

Within seconds a head broke the surface.

The moon was withdrawn, the river darkly glittering, so all he saw was the silhouette of head and shoulders. The creature rose. Over the lapping of the tide against the stair, Will heard the water running off it in rivulets. Then the moon broke through the clouds, dimly illuminating the monstrosity that was even now making its way up the stair, its footfalls a wet splat, splat.

The creature was hunched over, long stringy hair matting her face. Her blouse and skirts clung to her bloated frame. The dress swished as the animated dead mounted the stair.

Will knew how slippery the stairs were. He imagined how precarious the thing’s balance was. If he kicked it, it would probably fall; but he’d come here to capture one, not knock it back into the river. He backed away onto the dock, let it come for him.

It topped the stair, stepped onto the dock, and still it came, neither fast nor slow but inexorably, ponderously, as if it were a force of nature approaching—a cold front moving in, a thunderhead lowering over the city. Death with no promise of ease.

As if they’d drilled together, Will and Foley split up. Keeping to either side of the floater, they circled the horror, staying just out of reach. Tottering, grasping, swinging its arms in flailing arcs, it lurched now toward one, now toward the other, a watery growl gurgling up from its sodden lungs.

Will ducked under a flailing arm and drove his chopper into the bundle of nerves he knew to be housed in the armpit. As a boy, he’d once ducked under a bully’s roundhouse and planted his fist in his pit. The bully howled, and, as if the arm had lost all strength, Will was pleased to see the arm hang useless at the bully’s side. It had been a valuable lesson to the young hooligan, seeing that attacking what lay below the flesh was often more effective than whaling away at the outer skin.

The strike, which would certainly have rendered a normal person’s arm immobile, seemed to have no effect on the creature. Will barely had time to withdraw his blade before the arm came down, nearly trapping his hand.

Foley’s next move had more luck. While the beast focused on Will, the policeman moved in and drove his heel into the thing’s ribs. It floundered, slipped and, arms pinwheeling, went down with a noise like wet laundry hurled to the street.

Before it could rise, Foley threw himself on its back, pinning it down. It bucked and heaved. Foley hung on. Ignoring its grasping hands, Will plunged his blade into its eye. He preferred fat blades but, at the moment, he wished his knife was a stiletto. The wedge of steel burst the eyeball but lodged against the bone of the socket.

The head thrashed, teeth chomped, as bloodless goo leaked from the ruptured eye. The thing’s feet hammered the cement dock. Toes snapped with a loud crack.

Frustrated, Will plunged the blade into the woman’s neck, wrenched it out severing cartilage, veins, nerves, and muscle. As on the previous night when he’d nearly beheaded the thing eating Tim Peck, the gaping wound did not prove fatal. Rather than expire, the creature redoubled its efforts to rise, to buck Foley from its back. Its hands continued to grasp, its teeth to gnash, its feet to drum a tattoo on the dock.

A sound caught Will’s attention. A wet, watery noise. A splash followed by another.

From where he crouched, one knee pinning a writhing arm while Foley wrestled to draw the other to its side, he saw first one glistening face, then another, and a third rise into sight as three more of the creatures mounted the stair.

Foley followed his gaze, saw what he saw.

“We’ve got company. We have to go,” he said.

“Hold on.”

Desperate not to leave empty-handed, Will sawed at the thing’s wrist. The grey meat parted as easily as wet cheese, but bone and tendon refused to yield to his blade.

The first of the bogles, eyeless and noseless, half its cheek eaten away, hair spidering its forehead, teeth and fingers working, stepped onto the dock.

“Will.”

“Hold on!” More out of frustration than from any conscious design, Will placed his blade in the joint between the thing’s hand and wrist and, putting his boot on the back of the blade, stomped. Hand and wrist severed with a grisly parting of tendon and bone. Will’s blade grated against concrete.

Will jumped back as the hand scuttled toward him.

All three floaters were on the dock now—two men and a woman—water streaming from their sopping clothes. Perhaps the dead possessed a keen sense of smell, because blind or not, they advanced straight for the living. Behind them, two more emerged from the steps.

Will stabbed the hand, and with it writhing on his blade, he shouted, “Come on!” and sprinted for the narrow passage that ran between the factories to the street.

Foley fairly leapt from the creature’s back and followed.

***

The severed hand—mottled and greenish-black and glistening with decay—was stronger than they would have thought and quite active. Dr. Simon, lecturer in pathology, specialist in bacteriology and director of St. Thomas’ Medical School’s clinical laboratory, tried placing the hand in a steel laboratory tray, but it scuttled out onto the zinc-topped table like a particularly nimble crab. Securing it with a pair of sturdy forceps, he relocated it to a deep glass bowl. Even then, discovering it couldn’t simply crawl out, it took to leaping at the sides of the dish, and, as if the diabolical appendage were possessed of some fantastic learning ability, began trying to hook its pinky over the side. Apparently inexhaustible, it showed no abatement in its efforts to escape.

Dr. Simon looked up from the microscope, adjusted his wire rims. His majestic side-whiskers were considerably more hirsute than his bald pate which gleamed in the gaslight.

“Well?” Constable Foley asked impatiently.

Dr. Simon pursed his lips and focused his penetrating deep-green eyes on each of them before answering. “Frankly, I’ve never seen anything like this. Every corpse has its own unique microbial signature,” he said by way of preamble, “depending on its external and internal environment. In this case,” he indicated the energetic hand, “the teeming microbial life present in the water of the Thames is more active than the usual insectile contribution to decomposition.”

“Doctor . . . ” Foley gave a sideways tilt of his head in Will’s direction as if to indicate his companion’s lack of understanding, though he appeared plenty lost himself at the doctor’s language.

“Yes, I mean having been underwater for some time, I see no indication of flesh fly activity. No maggot larvae, no evidence of insectile colonization. But what’s really strange . . . ”

“Yes?”

The doctor hooked a thumb into the pocket of his waistcoat as he declaimed. “Ordinarily—always in fact—the cellular and microbial breakdown in a postmortem organism, be it insect or man, follows a predetermined course. Putrefaction is a process of self-digestion so to speak. Cellular walls, blood vessels, the intestines break down. Bacteria escapes from the gastrointestinal tract reducing soft tissue into gases, liquids, and salts. Oxygen depleted, aerobic bacterial species, which require oxygen to grow, shift to anaerobic ones, which feed not on oxygen but on the body’s tissues, fermenting their sugars to produce the gases that cause bloating. The smell of putrescence attracts blowflies, which lay eggs, from which maggots hatch, which consume the rotting flesh. As Linnaeus noted, ‘Three flies can consume a horse cadaver as rapidly as a lion.’”

He paused to let the enormity of what he’d said sink in, continued. “Now this—” The doctor thumped a knuckle against the glass, then started back when the hand leapt toward the sound. “Interesting,” he said, returning his thumb to his waistcoat pocket. “As I was saying, this specimen does not follow the pathology of putrescence. The oxygen is depleted, the flesh is loosening from the frame beneath. Albeit far more tardily than normal, cellular structures are breaking down—hence the stench of putrefaction—but I see no evidence of anaerobic bacteria consuming the tissue.”

“Look Doctor,” Will said, anxious for action, his fingers drumming against his cords, “all I want to know is how do I kill it.”

“Well, it’s obvious you can’t drown them.” When Will and Foley didn’t smile at his joke, Simon raised his bushy brows. “Let’s see . . . ” He turned to Foley. “You say your superior shot one and didn’t slow it?”

Foley nodded.

“Makes sense. It’s dead, blood’s already leaked out of its deteriorating veins. It’d be like shooting a vegetable.” He addressed Will: “And you severed the brachial plexus, the nerve bundle that runs from the spine through the armpit and down the arm. Unless your aim was poor—and I don’t doubt your accuracy—the arm should, indeed, have been immobilized. Frankly,” he said, raising his eyebrows again, “it’s beyond my understanding. It will take some study and a complete specimen to determine the pathology.”

Will glanced at a door at the end of the lab. It led to the dead house, euphemistically referred to as the “rose cottage” or—especially when discussing the deceased around children—“Rainbow’s End.” He wasn’t especially superstitious—though he wouldn’t go out of his way to step on a grave or walk under a ladder—but the thought of the room’s tenants sleeping in drawers waiting their turn in the operating theatre gave him the shudders.

“We don’t have time to study these . . . ” he waved at the mottled hand, “ . . . things. Again, I ask you, how do we kill it?”

Without further comment, the Doctor unstoppered a bottle he took from a shelf, half-filled a glass pipette and released the contents onto the back of the hand. The flesh bubbled, putrid steam rose. The hand danced about as if trying to shake off an attacker.

“Acid certainly works, but it would take a great quantity to dissolve a complete specimen. And I understand there are many more in our waterways.”

Taking a scalpel from a metal drawer, Dr. Simon pinned the struggling hand to the bottom of the bowl and sliced off the index finger which he plucked from the bowl before the hand could hitch a ride on the forceps. He dropped the finger into the steel tray.

Will and Foley watched in fascination as the finger inched along and, encountering the wall, tried in vain to climb the smooth metal.

Leaving the finger to its ineffectual efforts, Simon went to a cabinet and returned with a can. Will didn’t have to wait till the doctor unscrewed the lid and the fumes to hit him to know the canister contained kerosene: it read so on the label. Stepping up to the glass bowl, the pathologist administered a liberal splash over the hand, then extracted a Lucifer from his pocket and struck it. When he dropped the match, the hand ignited and raced about under a blur of flame.

Will caught the stench of burnt flesh. As the flesh blackened, the abomination redoubled its efforts to escape, as if driven by the primordial survival instinct. When the flames diminished, Simon splashed more kerosene on it. The flames ate the flesh until veins and muscle turned to ashes and the bones fell apart.

Simon poked at the bones with his forceps. “At least we know fire stops them,” he said.

The fire, however, was not a complete victory. No longer bound by sinew, the individual bones quivered with ghoulish life.