Legion of the Dead (15 page)

T
ogether with Sir Alfred, I leaped to my feet and dashed across the room to the bay windows. It was as black as a collier’s coal cellar outside. Starless. Moonless. In the light spilling from the drawing-room, I could see that as night had fallen so the fog had thickened once more, and was coiling and swirling around the courtyard.

Then, as we looked out, the flagstone just beside the fountain slowly rose, like a trap door in a hayloft. The howls of the Tannhausers grew louder, as did the sound of their claws desperately scratching at the front door.

‘They’re coming for me,’ I heard Sir Alfred whisper.

A hideous face – like a ghastly Jack-in-a-box – appeared from beneath the flagstone, its lipless skull-like head grinning insanely. Slowly, it hauled itself out of the sewer tunnel that lay below, and was replaced by another apparition, one-eyed and gap-toothed, its hair a wild crow’s nest of black and grey. Then another. And another …

I staggered back as the first of them raised a skeletal fist and began pounding at the window. The others followed suit and the blows echoed round the room, louder and louder, until the pane of glass abruptly shattered, sending vicious shards of glinting glass flying inside. A rush of cold air poured into the room, along with the stench of sewers and a pestilential odour of rotting and decay.

With a rattling grunt, the first hideous corpse seized the bars at the window with its bony hands and began shaking them violently.

Others did the same as more arrived, until every bar was encircled by the cadaverous fingers of the corpses as they rattled them in a ghoulish frenzy.

Suddenly, there was a bright flash and an ear-splitting
bang!
sounded in my ear. In front of me, the head of one of the lurching corpses exploded in a mess of teeth, bone and brains. A second shot ran out, and the ribs of a skeleton next to it shattered like the innards of a piano. I spun round to see the young doctor, his eyes wild, standing in the middle of the room with the smoking hunting rifle in his hand, busy reloading. The choking smell of gunpowder hung in the air.

From behind me, there came a
crack
and the splintering of wood. Turning, I saw the entire framework of iron bars coming away from the wooden window-frame, with the headless corpse and shattered skeleton working along with the rest, as the legion of the dead gave an almighty shove and sent the
window bars clattering to the floor. The creatures poured over the window-ledge and, crunching glass underfoot, flooded into the room.

The doctor fired again. Once, twice; the bullets smashing into the face of one and the shoulder of another.

‘Quick!’ he gasped, seizing his father, who was standing frozen to the spot, his mouth open and tears pouring down his face. He dragged him towards the door. ‘Mr Grimes …’

The three of us stumbled through the doorway. The doctor spun round, locked the door behind him, then slipped the bolt across.

‘This way,’ he told me.

We ran across the wooden hallway to the corridor opposite. Behind us, the noise of heavy blows and splintering wood resounded as the legion threw themselves at the door. I glanced round to see the glinting of metal as
an axe-head was driven through the oak panel. The doctor unlocked a door at the end of the corridor and opened it, to reveal a large kitchen on the other side. We hurried inside, to be confronted by a shadowy figure crouched over a large pine table by the kitchen range. Behind it was a broken window and, as it raised its head, I was confronted with my worst nightmare.

‘Firejaw O’Rourke,’ I breathed.

He raised his unburned hand and, filthy fingers outstretched, stumbled towards us. Suddenly, I realized that Firejaw wasn’t alone. From the shadows all round the great kitchen others emerged – a regiment of graveyard ghouls. One was bloated, her skin blue and grey; another, an emaciated dowager. A knock-kneed boy advanced in step with the skeletal one-armed sailor in a blood-stained uniform to his right …

‘Back to hell with all of you!’ Doctor de Vere shouted at Firejaw. He raised the rifle to
his eye and pulled the trigger.

A soft
click
sounded, followed by another.

‘Accursed thing,’ he spat and, taking the barrel of the rifle in both hands, lunged forward at the advancing corpse. The shaft cracked heavily into Firejaw’s head, sending blood and dust and splinters of bone flying across the room. ‘Get my father out of here,’ he shouted back. ‘Quickly, Mr Grimes. I’ll hold them off as long as I can.’

I hesitated, uneasy about leaving him.

‘Now!’

‘This way, sir,’ I said to Sir Alfred, taking him by the elbow and steering him through the door and back along the corridor.

From behind us, the sounds of smashing glass and crockery came from the kitchen; ahead, the frenzied battering of the drawing-room door was louder than ever. Back in the hall, the front door abruptly shattered and fell in splinters to the floor. A horde of lurching corpses streamed in, joined from
behind us by more, advancing along the corridor from the kitchen.

‘Is there a back way out?’ I hissed. ‘It’s our only chance.’

Shaking violently, the old man grabbed my arm and hurried through a door to our left. We passed through a windowless butler’s pantry and a box room lined with shelves of crockery and silverware, before arriving at a low battered-looking door with a rusting latch. Without saying a word, Sir Alfred threw himself at it. He pulled the bolts across, top and bottom, turned the key in the lock and lifted the latch.

‘I’d better go first,’ I said, unhooking my swordstick and stepping forward.

I opened the door and peered out across the broad croquet lawn on the other side, which was bordered by a high wall. The coast looked clear. I turned and nodded to Sir Alfred. We stepped outside, and I wedged the door shut with a garden rake. From inside,
came the muffled sounds of destruction as the legion of the dead ransacked the house.

‘What have I done?’ Sir Alfred murmured miserably. ‘Dear sweet Sienna, what have I done?’

All at once, before I could stop him, the old man took off across the croquet lawn towards the high wall opposite. Stopping at a small ivy-fringed gate, he fumbled with his keys, before unlocking it – just as I caught up with him.

‘I must go to her,’ he gasped, disappearing through the gate.

I followed, and found myself in a small walled graveyard. Glancing at the grand tombs and ornate headstones, it quickly became clear that this was the private resting place of generations of the ancient and venerable de Vere family. Nothing as vulgar as a common public graveyard would do for this aristocratic family, I realized, but instead, a private chapel and a cloistered graveyard
where the lords and ladies could rest in peace in their grand tombs.

Sir Alfred was down on his knees in front of a tall white marble sarcophagus, a magnificent winged angel bestriding the arched top. The entire tomb was illuminated by an ornate brass lamp which hung on a chain that dangled from the outstretched right hand of the angel.

‘It burns constantly,’ Sir Alfred murmured. ‘To the memory of my dearest departed Sienna.’

I swallowed nervously. The ghastly apparitions were at the gateway.

There was a wizened hag with a hooked nose and rat’s-nest hair. A portly matron, the ague that had seen her off still glistening on her furrowed brow … A sly-eyed ragger and a bare-knuckled wrestler, his left eyeball out of its socket and dangling on a glistening thread. A corpulent costermonger; a stooped scrivener, their clothes – one satins and frill,
the other threadbare serge – smeared alike with black mud and sewer slime. A maid, a chimney-sweep, a couple of stable-lads; one with the side of his skull stoved in by a single blow from a horse’s hoof, the other grey and glittery-eyed from the blood-flecked cough that had ended his life. And a burly river-tough – his fine waistcoat in tatters and his chin tattoo obscured by filth. Glistening at his neck was the deep wound that had taken him from this world to the next.

I shrank back in horror and pressed hard against the cool white marble of the de Vere family vault at my back. Beside me – his body quivering like a slab of jellied ham – Sir Alfred was breathing in stuttering, wheezy gasps. From three sides of the marble tomb in that fog-filled graveyard, the serried ranks of the undead were forming up in a grotesque parody of a parade-ground drill.

‘They’ve found me,’ the old doctor croaked, in a voice not much more than a whisper.

I followed his terrified gaze and found myself staring at four ragged figures in military uniform, red jackets with gold braid at the epaulettes and cuffs, who were standing on a flat-topped tomb above the massed ranks. Each of them bore the evidence of fatal injuries.

The terrible gash down the face of one, that had left his cheekbone exposed and a flap of leathery skin dangling. The blood-stained chest and jagged stump – all that remained of his left arm – of the second figure, splinters of yellow bone protruding through the wreaths of grimy bandages. The rusting axe, cleaving the battered bell-top shako, which was embedded in the skull of the third. And the bulging bloodshot eyes of the fourth, the frayed length of rough rope that had strangulated his last breath still hanging round his bruised and red-raw neck – and a flagpole clutched in his gnarled hands.

As I watched, he raised the splintered flagpole
high. Gripping my swordstick, I stared at the fluttering curtain of blood-stained cloth, tasselled brocade hanging in filthy matted strands along the four sides. At its centre was the embroidered regimental emblem – the Angel of Victory, her wings spread wide on a sky-blue field, and beneath, the words
33rd Regiment of Foot
written in an angular italic script. The ghastly standard-bearer’s tight lips parted to reveal a row of blackened teeth.

‘Fighting Thirty-Third!’ he cried out, his voice a rasping whisper.

The corpses swayed where they stood, their bony arms reaching forward, with tattered sleeves hanging limply in the foggy air. I smelled the sourness of the sewers about them; that, and the sweet whiff of death. Their sunken eyes bored into mine.

We were surrounded. There was nothing Sir Alfred or I could do. The standard-bearer’s voice echoed hoarsely round the graveyard.

‘
Advance!
’

From all three sides, the legion of the dead closed in on us. I flicked the catch on my swordstick and drew the blade.

‘That won’t save us now!’ wailed Sir Alfred. ‘Nothing can save us …’

The words caught in his throat and turned to a strangulated gargle as the tall figure of Colour Sergeant McMurtagh strode towards us. He was clutching a golden sword, gripped by a golden hand, severed at the wrist. Sir Alfred fell back, spread-eagled on his wife’s tomb, the glow from the marble angel’s lamp illuminating his terrified features.

The colour sergeant brushed past me and I caught the musty odour of death, dust and sea water. Behind him, the three corporals came to a halt, their dead faces inches from my own. With a supreme effort of will, I turned away. The colour sergeant raised the golden sword above his head as he straddled the prone figure of Sir Alfred, who stared up
at him, a look of absolute horror on his face.

So this was it. The four soldiers that Sir Alfred had brought back from the dead, all those years ago in the far-off hills of the Malabar Kush, had returned. He had used the demonic powers of the goddess Kal-Ramesh to disturb their eternal rest to enrich himself, and now those undead ghouls had come back to take their revenge on him.

Or so it seemed …

Suddenly, the colour sergeant brought the golden sword down with a great scything hammer blow. The blade struck the marble, inches to the right of Sir Alfred’s head and shattered into pieces, leaving a single shard embedded in the marble.

For a moment, all was still. Then, from inside the tomb, there came the sound of scuffling and scratching, faint at first, but getting louder by the second. Then, with a crack like a musket shot, the marble fractured round the golden shard, and hairline fissures
spread out from it like the tendrils of an exotic plant.

As the stone crumbled and the tomb split apart, Sir Alfred groaned and tumbled to the ground, and out of the cloud of dust the unearthly figure of Lady Sienna de Vere, the angel with the lamp, rose from the grave, now no more than a desiccated skeleton in a threadbare gown of yellowish white.

For one last time, the ghastly sword of the goddess had done its infernal work, and raised the dead.

In front of Lady Sienna, the colour party bowed their ghastly heads and sank to their knees. Then she stepped forward, and as she did so, I saw it. In the centre of the tiara she wore, glowing above the eyeless sockets beneath, was a black jewel.

It was the eye of the demon goddess, Kal-Ramesh.

I suddenly realized that it was
this
, and not poor Sir Alfred, that had drawn these soldiers
here. This jewel, it seemed, and not revenge, was what they had been seeking so desperately.

It was the eye of the Demon Goddess Kal-Ramesh
.

All at once, a curling tendril of brilliant light flared from the depths of the jewel and shot out across the graveyard, dividing and dividing again into a thousand different branches. Each one pierced a chest of one of the assembled dead, until every corpse seemed shot through with a dazzling thread of energy.