The Flesh Market

The Old Man & The Wretch

Tuesday, December 9th, 1862

The old man slammed the book down on the table with what little power his enfeebled limbs would grant him. His heart laboured in his chest, and he closed his eyes to calm himself.

With an effort of will that would have surprised few who knew him, he attacked the tightness in his chest by focusing on the cause of that very thing. Taking a scalpel's eye view, he imagined himself at the heart's edge. The pericardium was before him, the double-walled sac protecting the organ within, and he pictured it healthy, rippling with tensile flexibility, keeping him safe. Delving deeper, he dived into the flow of his own deoxygenated blood, returning depleted from its long trek around the body, flooding into the left atria. With a spasm he was pumped through the tricuspid valve, down into the larger left ventricle, and from there was shoved hard through the pulmonary valve and into the lungs.

In the lungs the great exchange took place, the weary sludge of carbon dioxide trading places with the cool stream of incoming oxygen. Buoyed up with new energy, he swam the bloodstream through pulmonary veins back up to the left atrium, letting himself be hauled through the mitral valve into the massive left ventricle, largest and most powerful of the heart's chambers. When those walls spasmed he laughed as he was slammed out of the aortic valve and into the rubbery aorta, the hose through which oxygen would be delivered to gasping cells throughout his body.

The old man opened his eyes, a hand on his chest, trying to assess whether he had done enough. The mental journey was one of many similar scenes he had conjured for himself during his life. The human body was known to him down to the tiniest detail, though it was dead flesh that he had spent his youth carving his way through. Through the power of his own imagination, he willed that dead flesh to life, put himself inside it, and understood it better. Now the images were a comforting familiarity, and if the weak but regular pulsing beneath his fingertips spoke true, they were as soothing as they had ever been.

At times he had conceived of a device, some manner of medical instrument fitted with lenses, which could be inserted into a living body. How wondrous it would be to peer through and compare the pulsing reality with the fantasies he had built around dead flesh. Invention was never his forte though. His intellect was bound to the pursuit of knowledge rather than the development of tools to make the chase a little easier. It made him sad now, at the end of his days, that no more practical mind than his had conceived a similar notion, that he might benefit from the use of such a thing.

Raising himself from the chair by the fire, taking care to keep his movements slow and his breathing steady, he shuffled towards the entrance hall of his Hackney home. The lights on the wall burned steady. A miracle in itself, gas lighting inside houses. Would he trade that for the dissectascope he had fantasised about? While his younger self would have made the switch on the instant, decrying convenience in favour of a revolution in understanding, he was older and wiser. Seventy-one, weak in both the muscles and spirit of the heart, there were many indulgences he would no longer be without.

Drawing himself with care to his full height, he gazed at the tired old man in the oval mirror next to the front door. There had been greatness there once, worn with pride in his every sneer and gesture. Now little remained but memories, and even they were distorted half truths.

Half-truths were better than the inflammatory lies Alexander Leighton had invented for his pitiful book. He watched his reflection's face crease with rage at the author's name, and forced himself to take measured breaths. It had been a mistake to take it off the shelf again. The fool had titled his effort Court of Cacus, and had the temerity to declare it a true and accurate account of the old man's darkest time. In classical mythology Cacus had been a monster who dined on human victims and nailed their heads by the doors of his cave. The allusion that it was he, the old man, who had played Cacus in real life was trite and absurd, but it cut him. Whenever those days were recalled, he took another wound. It was a torture he inflicted on himself often. Leighton's damned penny dreadful obsessed him, calling him to read and re-read it, making him snarl at fictions and half-truths. The book went so much further than other purported accounts, portraying him as a self-aggrandising necromancer, despicably cruel to those who deserved better. It made only the most flippant mention of the reason for his actions, the things he had sought to achieve.

For all the good it had served the world. After his ruin, his work suffered the same fate. That he was right, that he had been pushing to achieve what nobody else at that time had envisioned, mattered little to the mobs, be they comprised of the incensed chattle of the streets or the ivory-towered cretins of academia.

Although Cacus was not the first printed volume to commit slanders against him (the first, Murderers of the Close, had been published with indecent haste after the discovery of what he had been party to, and had been even more speculative for that), it carried a weight of imagined authenticity. Leighton had done his homework, actually claiming to have derived much of his new information from a person or persons who had been near the very heart of things. Although the source was never named it was apparent to him which puling cretin had spoken out. Long ago discredited, enough time had perhaps passed for the world to forget the proven lies already bandied about by that walking pustule. The old man stared at himself in the glass, wondering how he could ever have been foolish enough to place his trust there. Dark times made for poor judgements.

Poor judgement. There was the rub, the constant thorn pricking at his conscience, diverting him from focussing on worthier matters. The world had declared him a thing of evil, no more than a butcher. They had forgotten the great terror that had fallen on Edinburgh then, and the solutions he had been endeavouring to find. Everything he had done had benefitted science and knowledge, or so he had told himself for three decades.

Yet, what if he had been in error? What if there were boundaries that should not be crossed, even in the search for salvation?

Pah, he said to himself, a spray of spittle marring the mirror. Aware that he was circling the same tired arguments with little hope of breaking the cycle, he went back to his study, intent on dousing the lights and retiring for the evening. The hospital appointment had taken a toll on him that afternoon, and though he had been well enough to return home, he was not yet recovered. That drew a smile, bitter though it tasted. The old man had watched people fade away before, and knew that recovery was a fool's dream. While his spiral towards death may have slowed, it could not be reversed.

Perhaps there was still time to set the record straight. He had long kept his silence regarding the truth of that hellish year, but of late had considered putting his own pen to paper. He had no doubt that people would pay for the privilege of reading his account. Time had not diminished the gruesome fascination the public demonstrated regarding matters of death and rebirth. He had even mentioned to his few friends that he was toying with the notion. William, in particular, had been encouraging. While the younger man's own reputation had not been stained so deeply with bile and venom, his name was also attached to the tale and ever would be. An account from their side, a truth to float upon a sea of lies and misinformation, appealed to both of them. No excuses. No apologies. Just blunt facts.

Futility had prevented him from taking action. Whatever he might say, he had long ago learned that the masses would latch on to more titillating accounts, regardless of their accuracy. Already a victim of much newspaper slander, he could expect no support from those journals of mediocrity, either. It took no great feat of reasoning to conclude that anything he might disclose, short of confessing to what the world wished to believe of him, would be mocked and scorned as a weak attempt at self-justification. While he had been tried by the press rather than the courts, he would not be granted an impartial right to reply in the same medium.

As he muttered to himself, not realising that he was speaking aloud, the jangle of a bell sounded through the house. Somebody outside had yanked the door chime, and done so hard. The old man looked at the clock on the mantle of the room behind him. It was half past ten at night.

He received few enough callers at the best of times, his reputation having travelled far, but those that remained would not call at so uncivilised an hour.

The bell rang again. The old man was not taken to fear, feeling only irritation at the discourtesy. Straightening as best he could, he slid back the bolt and threw open the door with a snarl.

It died on his lips. The bent and broken man on his step was twenty years his junior, but any casual witness would swear it was the other way round. Lamplight from the hallway played over his visitor's blind eyes, made stark the contrast between his filthy flesh and the old, pale alkali burns that marked his neck and cheeks. Smaller than the old man, his rag-clothed visitor looked to be the most loathsome beggar the streets could throw up, and had no place in the gentle village of Hackney.

The beggar's head twitched, and despite his blindness, he gave a savage snarl of recognition.

I see, said the old man, and his heart began to race anew. I wondered when you might arrive. Stepping back, he pulled the door further open. You had better come in then.

With a cruel twist of the lips, the wretch stumbled into the house, one hand smudging dirt on the wall as he leaned on it to guide himself.

The old man closed the door behind them.

Chapter 1

The Cadaver Riots

Sunday, September 17th, 1826

Dead men! Dead men rising here! Dead men on the rise! Citizens to the castle! Safety at the castle! Dead men rising here!

The cry went up across Edinburgh at twenty minutes past ten at night, soldiers and night watchmen bearing the message wherever they could, fighting the crowds already on the streets in a vain attempt to funnel them to the high ground where they might be defended. The castle was the uppermost point in the city, perched on ancient volcanic rock, brightly lit with lanterns and torches and already filling to capacity with the terrified poor. The riots below had been in progress for three hours before the city leaders took proper credence of the facts, incredible as they were, and began to organise.

Where the shambling dead came from nobody could tell, but when squads of soldiers braved the graveyards they found the earth undisturbed, the corpses accounted for. All that could be ascertained in those first hours of screaming panic was that the riot had started amid the towering grey tenements of the Old Town during early evening, where whole families shared single rooms in filthy squalor, and death was a common caller. The subsequent investigation into what would be remembered as the Cadaver Riots of 1826 found little to suggest that those first few dead were native to Edinburgh, and much furious debate would ensue regarding their source.

On the night of September 17th, 1826, there was little time to ponder cause and blame. The castle was a maelstrom of industry, as preparations were made to take in all who could reach it. The Portcullis Gate stood wide open at the front, guards manning it with weapons drawn. Within sat the Argyle Battery, cannons primed and manned, as were the other munitions across the castle. Only Mons Meg, the fifteenth-century siege cannon perched outside St Margaret's chapel on the high battlements, stood quiet, her burst barrel depriving her of the night's excitement. No orders to fire had yet been given, nor did the gunners have any idea of what the eventual target might be, for the cannons overlooked the gaslit Princes Street and the wealthy New Town to the East. So far no word had come that the walking dead infested those clean, symmetrical districts. Like all diseases, they had sallied forth from amidst the cluttered ranks of the poor.

The road up to the Portcullis Gate was already filling with refugees, who were waved in by the troops. Castle Esplanade, the wide and sloping open ground separating castle and city, was more crowded still. The troops stationed there, charged with ensuring that only those with a pulse were allowed entry, had yet to lay eyes on the living dead. Screams echoed up to them from the city through the crisp night air, breeding panic and paranoia. Faced with oncoming hordes of the shrieking, despairing working class, more than one soldier discharged his weapon in terrified error, snuffing out innocent lives. A commendable, frantic effort by their sergeants and captains was all that prevented a hysterical escalation, and the gunning down of dozens.

Only those escorted by armed guards were truly safe, including the surgeons and doctors who could be found and conscripted into service. Dragged from their homes an hour before on the most adamant of invitations, they were now ensconced in the castle hospital and working furiously through the new patients pouring in. Many were anatomists and lecturers, some of whom had not applied a bandage for many years. Despite this they gave graciously of their skills, though all the while their thoughts blazed and obsessions bloomed.

Many lives were saved that night by the decision to send the citizens to the fortress. Since the dead had risen in Berlin two years before, city leaders across Europe had drawn up contingency plans they hoped never to put to use. With the North Sea standing sure between the United Kingdom and the foreign practises of Europe there had been a misplaced certainty that the unholy horrors would not be seen on British soil, but though devised as an afterthought Edinburgh's solution proved effective enough. From its vantage point on the rock, the castle was unassailable on three sides thanks to the sheer cliffs all about, challenging for an able-bodied man to scale, impossible for a wretched, uncoordinated cadaver. The only credible approach was from the East, up the Castle Esplanade and the long Royal Mile. The succession of streets making up the Mile slid down a steep tail of rock between the castle and the ruins of Holyrood Abbey. Narrower wynds of steep stone steps plummeted into the Old Town below. The Mile was often described as the backbone of a herring, with the castle as the skull, the abbey as a tail, and the streets and stepped wynds dropping off it acting as the many ribs.

Leading down from the Esplanade, the narrow street of Castlehill, topmost leg of the Mile, was clogged with struggling citizens frantic for sanctuary. To that end St John's Church too had flung open its doors, alleviating the pressure briefly as it filled to bursting, before shutting out hundreds more. Within, three young men worked with freezing fingers to sew and bandage what wounds they could. Still students of medicine, they had been called to join the makeshift hospital on the bowels of the castle but, with the escorted carriages reserved for more important men of medicine than they, had been able to force their way only so far as St John's on foot. With dark creatures seeking flesh outside, and the rank stench of the sweating dispossessed, they abandoned rational thought and took solace in endless repetitive action. None of them had seen the corpses attacking the living during the race from their homes, but fear is a disease, and the gabbled half stories they overheard as they were battered through the crowds took seed in their imaginations and blossomed.

Further down the Mile, past the site of the linen market and into the High Street, all was darkness. The riot had begun before the Watch lit what streetlamps there were through this part of the city, and though attempts had been made to brave the chaos and do so anyway, rumours of the threat they faced forced the authorities to call back able-bodied men to assist with the futile effort to establish order. People streamed up the Mile like rats, joined along the way by hundreds more entering through the closes and up the wynds. They clambered over one another, darkness making the screams seem louder. The least robust were trampled underfoot, bones shattered, throats crushed, and in what little illumination was granted by the swinging lanterns of those few who carried them by hand, it was possible to see that some of the cooling bodies began first to twitch, and then to rise. Were a light held steady, it would have been possible to note that those reanimating husks each bore, somewhere about their persons, distinctive bite and scratch marks.

Further still down the Mile, on the Canongate, a woman who had spent the last few months on the streets pleasuring men for pennies, backed away from four of the dead, too scared even to scream. Men and women ran from the shuffling horrors, seeing her plight and knowing her death would buy them distance, give them precious minutes more to wheeze up the steep street. Even in the darkness she could tell that three of the corpses were fresh, dead-eyed but still warm, chunks of meat missing from the necks and torsos where they had been fed upon. Blood still oozed from the wounds. She didn't know who any of them were, and was glad.

The fourth was older, a grey hunched thing, long dead. There were holes about its skin where its desiccated parchment remains had shredded as it moved, and what moisture she saw in the callow moonlight came from rot and decay. If the thing had ever been buried, its grave clothes had long since rotted to nothing. It was naked, a different kind of customer to those she had been forced to dally with, seeking to sate different hungers.

They came for her without pause, arms out and heads lolling. The old one stayed silent, as the freshest groaned deep in their throats. Retreating toward a forbidding building, her back pressing to the door, she dreamed of repentance and heaven, knowing that it was too late for either.

As the dead closed the final feet, the door behind her opened and firm, hard hands dragged her inside. She screamed, but female voices soothed her as a bolt slammed home and cold fists beat against the far side of the wood. Shh, girl, said a woman. You're safe now. This is Magdalene Asylum, and nothing gets in or out of here without our say-so.

To the West, several stories below the Mile, smoke poured through the Grassmarket. One of the buildings was ablaze, and the only surprise was that more had not yet joined it. Men and women fought each other as they ran, the message to flee to the castle either never having reached them, or having been misunderstood. Some stayed in their rooms, and many survived the night. Others ran through the streets, not knowing that dead things plugged both ends of the long quadrangle of the market, marching inwards in an instinctive pincer movement, ready to slaughter.

Outside the Last Drop public house, a simpleton watched an old woman eat a screaming man. She had him pinned to the ground, and despite being bigger than she, her victim could not throw her off. Her jaw was clamped to his cheek, worrying through the flesh, blood flowing from her lips to drench her scrawny neck and dirt-grey shawl.

A big man, the simpleton's nickname reflected his intel-lect, though he bore the moniker with no ill feeling because he knew it was the truth. His sister always said it with a smile, and when she smiled he was happy. It was his sister he sought, but there were so many people shouting and running, banging into him as they passed, that he couldn't remember how to get to her house. When he saw the lady eating the man's face, even the thought of his sister vanished from his mind. Tears flowed from his eyes, smearing soot-stained cheeks, and he shook his head. He could not understand why the lady was eating the man. No, Jamie, no, he muttered, not knowing he was doing so. Jamie doesn't like it.

Movement caught his eye behind the lady, drawing his attention not because it was big and riotous like the running and screaming, but because it was small and furtive. There, in the shadows of a close entrance. Two children held each other as they huddled against the grimy brickwork, a boy and a girl. Brother and sister, perhaps. They stared at the old lady too, their faces white and unmoving. He recognised them, though he did not know their names. He had told them jokes, and sang to them. He had played their day-of-the-week games. Shame bubbled up in him when he noticed that they were not crying like him, and the corners of his mouth turned down. Perhaps they would be able to tell him what was happening, or show him where his sister lived.

Smoke passed, burning his eyes, and when it cleared the children were no longer alone. There was a bleeding man behind them, staggering from the gloom with drool on his lips, his left ear and chunks of his neck missing. When he saw the children his arms rose towards them, and his shuffle grew more urgent.

The simpleton screamed, still no nearer to being able to explain what he was seeing, knowing only that there was danger. Taking two fast steps, he leaped over the woman, clipping her shoulder with his bare left foot and sending her sprawling, her victim's cheek still in her teeth. Paying her no heed, his focus narrowing down to two tiny forms and a predator, he sprinted to the close, beating the bleeding man by a heartbeat. Snatching up the children, one in each strong arm, he scooted back. The old woman lifted herself from the ground, her victim already on his feet and running as he clutched his ruined face, and turned towards them.

Neither of the things stepped closer. The bleeding man swayed where he stood, head cocked, eyes on the still children in the simpleton's grip. Its hunger was palpable, but it made no move. The old woman waited too, sensing something new, something strange. The simpleton held his breath against the smoke and fate, his back to the grimy wall with nowhere to run. The children were safe in his arms, and he moved his head slowly back and forth, taking in first one predator and then another with teary eyes, waiting and thinking of his sister.

The dead clogged the far end of the Grassmarket, where the folk of Edinburgh fought with makeshift weapons to reach the brightly lit castle above. Behind them lay West Port, the Irish immigrant district. Battles raged there too. Although it would not be clear for some hours, it was in West Port that the dead were first seen, where the first attacks took place. To the people crowded through that district, thoughts of flight were just a distracting fantasy. Word had spread that the dead were between them and sanctuary, and so each family held their ground in their home, a thousand miniature sieges.

In a lodging house in Tanner's Close, a woman banged nails through shards of smashed-up furniture, pinning them in place behind the front windows. Her husband, so much younger than she, worked the same task at the front door. It was a frantic chore, for until moments ago they had thought themselves sealed in.

Lights off, they had been waiting quietly with their sole tenant, a military pensioner who had bided with them for some weeks. The door had smashed open, the fragile lock inadequate against the strange strength of the dead men, and a hulking brute had collapsed through to join them, landing on the old man and fastening ferocious jaws into his calf.

It was her husband who had saved them all. Though he stood barely five foot four, tiny next to the thing making the pensioner bleat like a goat in a slaughterhouse, he had exploded with rage. Snatching up a kettle with one hand, he brought it down on the thing's head, an over arm strike that crunched the skull like dry clay. Though it didn't stop the brute moving, it forced it to release its prey, and they bundled it back out of the door as the old man slid to the floor, clutching his leg and moaning.

Stop mewling, old man, her husband had snapped, a dull fire in his eyes, or I'll finish what it started. The old man glared at him, then turned his face against the straw pallet of one of the beds to stifle his own cries. Shut the door, her husband said, turning away with a nonchalant confidence that thrilled her. I'll find hammer and nails.

She was safe with her man, she knew. With him by her side, there was no need for fear.

As the night went on, past midnight and into the wee small hours, the streets of Edinburgh Old Town cleared of the living. The thousands crammed into the castle, their bites and scratches patched, their broken limbs reset, took comfort from the men of war to whom they had passed responsibility for their safety. Some even slept.

For thousands more, trapped in their own rooms or those of their neighbours, the night was longer, and many feared that the sun would never again rise. The most devout spoke of final judgement and the wages of sin, each more certain than the next that they were being put to suffering for the deeds of their fellows. Such thoughts were not forgotten come daybreak, and there was much overflowing of the coffers of churches in the following days, the poor getting poorer that they might buy eventual passage in their preferred direction. None who laid eyes on the shambling horrors their friends and loved ones had become would easily forget them.

With the light, soldiers moved through the streets and buildings one at a time, clearing away both the static and the restless dead. The operation began on the morning of Monday, September 18th, in crisp golden sunlight, and much of the work was complete before nightfall. Patrols roamed the quiet streets for four days after, as people kept to their homes as much as they could. The appetites of the dead meant that they had little patience for hiding, if they could even claim to understand such a concept, and the few remaining stragglers soon announced themselves and were despatched. On Friday the 22nd September the all clear was given. The threat was gone.

Or at least, as some commentators whispered, the threat was sleeping.

Chapter 2

Robert Knox

Monday, October 15th, 1827

The rapping was persistent, digging into the edges of Knox's mind and pulling him inexorably from a deep, exhausted slumber. The climb to full wakefulness was slow, for the day had been long. Only a few short weeks ago, the academic term had begun at the University of Edinburgh, and the competition to lure in medical students was fierce among the rival anatomists supplementing their researches with lectures and dissection classes. The previous year he had entered partnership with his old tutor James Barclay, and though his friend's declining health had left Knox with the full burden of the teaching duties, there had been a sense of shared responsibility. Now Barclay was dead, and the school at 10 Surgeon's Square belonged solely to Knox. It was the opportunity he had waited a lifetime for, and this was the year that would make or break his ambition.

The distant knocking reeled him into the world, and he opened his eyes. His left was blind, the sight stolen from it by smallpox many years hence. The right gazed into the darkness. It was still night, but his disorientated body clock offered him no further clues than that.

Night. Knocking at the door. Knox's heart kicked into gear as memory and the present mixed together. The rapping on the door. The chaos on the streets. The rush to the castle, and the dead things that had reached for him in the bowels of the hospital there.

Mary stirred in bed beside him, and memory receded to its proper place. Robert, she said, what hour is it?

Late, he told her, reaching a hand back to stroke her hair. Too late for callers. He heard the front door open. McCrimmon has it. Sleep, Mary. I'll see to this.

Though his lanterns were doused he found the door to the bedroom easily enough, and once on the landing he was aided by light filtering up from below. Leaning over the banister, he listened to his butler address their nocturnal visitor. I must insist, sir. The master of the house is not to be disturbed. Whatever it is need wait for a civilised hour.

Not this, friend. Knox recognised the nasal whine of the voice as soon as he heard it. I'm here on his say-so, see? It's news he wants for badly. He won't thank you for delaying it.

A risk I am prepared to endure. Good night to you.

Wait, said Knox, descending the stairs. McCrimmon looked back from where he blocked the door, his intimidating height shielding the view of the man outside. Let him in. I'll see him.

As you wish, sir. He pulled the door open, revealing young David Paterson on the step, cap in hand, shuffling nervously from one foot to the other. Do you wish me to prepare some refreshments?

No, that will be all McCrimmon. The man paused, uncomfortable with leaving his master alone with a midnight caller of unknown provenance. He works for me, at the school. Knox shot Paterson a sharp glance as he explained. I presume he is here on some suitably urgent business matter.

As you say, sir. I shall retire to the pantry, and await your pleasure. The subtext was clear enough. I shall be close at hand, should you require assistance. Knox nodded, accepting the lamp McCrimmon held as the butler made his way down the corridor. When he was certain his servant was gone he waved Paterson inside, glancing once out to the street to see whether the boy had been followed. Fog had settled fast over the city, smothering the gaslights so that they were visible only as diffuse halos. Whether Paterson had taken pains to go undiscovered through the streets was a moot point, for nobody would have been able to track him that night. It was foolish paranoia to think that anybody would be interested anyway. If the matter Paterson wished to discuss was as Knox suspected then they were doing nothing wrong, at least in the eyes of the law.

In his early twenties, Paterson had the look of a weasel about him, the impression heightened by