The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [109]
Quire returned his attention to the street. The life of Leith continued outside, oblivious and indifferent to the madness being described in the little room. He was envious of the mundane concerns he knew ran through the men and women going up and down the narrow street: the simple desires and hungers, the vague hopes and small sadnesses. He would much rather have himself filled up with such things than with the memories and the furies and the fears that occupied him now.
“A great man,” Durand was saying, “but one who succumbed to temptation. He had to reach further, deeper. He began to work upon human corpses. He wanted to restore life. No; more than that. He wanted to restore souls. It was a noble ambition. So I thought, when I became privy to it. But he had not succeeded. His experiments… well, let us say no more than that they did not succeed. Except Blegg. Blegg is different.”
“What about Blegg?” Quire asked sharply.
“A moment, please.” Durand coughed, a loose rattle in his chest. “I will come to the matter of Blegg in a moment. I allied myself with Ruthven, and I brought my own secrets. Recipes for preservative elixirs, something for the hearts that Carlyle’s machines revived to pump around the body. Invocations and bindings, recorded on tablets older even than Egypt; transcribed on to the hands of the corpses, they bind an animating force to the flesh.”
“Not a soul, though,” Agnes said quietly, and Durand hung his head. Shivered.
“No, not a soul. Never a soul. In that, we all fell short of our ambitions. Formless, mindless things that we brought forth and incarnated in the dead. Animating force, nothing more. Fierce. Savage, without the dominating will of a mind to guide it. And never lasting. Always, the bindings failed in time; the body failed. Then it was burned, and the next was begun.”
“You dug up graves to get the bodies,” Quire said.
“Oui. Blegg did. The invention of that foul habit at least is not amongst our sins. You had body snatchers aplenty before ever the dead began to flow through Ruthven’s door.”
“Aye.”
“It became too much for Carlyle. He took to drinking, then tried to remove himself from the affair entirely. The dogs did it for him. Anyway, after your exploits at Duddingston, the grave robbing stopped. Of late they have been buying bodies, letting others do the digging—or the killing, I know not which—on their behalf. They’ve abandoned the farm, brought the apparatus to Ruthven’s house, in the cellar. Blegg pays a man called Hare, and the corpses… well, they appear in Melville Street.”
“You say Blegg is something different, though?” rasped Quire, his impatience rising like bile. “Not like these other… creatures Ruthven has made?”
“Blegg. Oui. He is something different, something very old. I think the madness that is in that house—it came with him, I think. The worst of it.
“You understand: it is not Blegg, not his mind or his spirit, that occupies his form. Whoever Blegg was, he died before I ever met him. I never knew quite how, though I always had the feeling that he was somehow the first real victim in all of this. Anyway, Ruthven, in his careless explorations, woke something else in Blegg’s corpse. Invited something in. Something that is much more than the dull animal spirits of the others.”
“Do you believe all of this?” Quire asked Agnes softly.
She had sat quite still all through Durand’s speech, save for the flex in her cheeks and lips as she drew smoke down into her chest and let it leak out again. She blinked, very slowly, very heavily, and looked up.
“Maybe,” she said.
She pointed at the morose Frenchman with the stem of her pipe.
“Look at him. Sick to the very root of him, and it’s no natural sickness, I can tell you that.”
“No,” Durand grunted. “It is Blegg, telling me to come home. Like a man calling out for his straying dog. He and Ruthven think—wrongly, as it happens, but no matter—they think there are further secrets I can yet uncover