The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [96]
“Visitors aren’t welcome, then,” Quire murmured.
“So it seems.”
Quire pushed his way into a side room, through another stiff and resistant door. There were floorboards, almost lost beneath the drifts of soggy dust. They grumbled beneath him, yielding with murmurs of exhaustion. Dark smears were all over the walls, where water had come through to discolour the plaster and spread stains of mould. Patches of that plaster had fallen away, from walls and ceiling alike, littering the floor like plates of bark shed from a tree.
Quire’s breath sounded loud to him. He stifled it, making himself calm. The air he drew carefully in tasted sour and stale, as if nothing had stirred it for years. There was a fire grate, rusted away and almost collapsed in on itself; a dull red and black skeleton of gnawed bones. Piles of crumbling wood that might once have been furniture, but it was impossible to say of what kind in the gloom.
“I heard there was an old soldier rented it, a long while back,” Agnes said behind him, and her voice was so sudden that Quire started and gasped, and then put his hand to his brow to compose himself. He felt the subtle weight of the rowan charm against his sleeve.
“So beat down he could find nowhere else for him and his wife to end their days,” Agnes went on. “First one to dare the place in a hundred years, and the last. Didn’t get past the first night, way the tale’s told.”
“What happened?” Quire whispered.
“Woke in their bed to a visitation. There’s different things I’ve heard. Some said they saw a calf, or a cat; familiars of the Devil, come seeking their dead master. Some said they saw Weir himself, standing right there watching them while they slept.” She sniffed. “Don’t much credit it myself.”
Another room. Another musty silence. Quire shifted some of the detritus about with the toe of his boot. Each time he disturbed it, he smelled putrefaction, and the piss and dung of rats. In this chamber, there were roof beams stretched across the ceiling. They sagged. The vast weight of the tenement above, the lives being lived in it, bore down upon that small dark place.
“What did he do?” Quire asked. “Weir, I mean. To get himself burned.”
“I’d not think anyone could tell you that,” Agnes replied. “I ken what he was accused of: unnatural and perverse congress, with his sister and with beasts of the field. The corruption of those about him. The invocation of Satanic powers.”
“Did he have children?”
“Not that I ever heard.”
“Blegg can’t be a descendant of his, then.”
Muted light was seeping through another doorway. Quire went towards it, and looked through into a last room. There was a small window, caked with filth, in the far wall, but a door had been propped against it, blocking out most of the light. He eased it aside and scraped some of the dirt from the glass. The window let out into some boxed-in little square of flagstones, to which no doors, no passageways, gave access; a forgotten fragment of ground, engulfed by the city.
Quire straightened, looked at the grime now clinging to his fingertips. He rubbed them thoughtfully on the leg of his trousers.
“Someone’s been here,” Agnes said.
Quire turned to look at her.
“There’s footprints.”
Now that there was more light reaching in, he could see them. Not a legible trail, but the rough impression of boots here and there on the grubby floor.
“Place reeks of darkness,” Agnes said. “Evil spends long enough in one spot, it can never be right again.”
She was only now starting to sound as uneasy as Quire had felt all along. He put his hand to his side, just tracing the shape of the pistol through his jacket. It was no great comfort. The oppressive atmosphere of Weir’s old house was not something that could be dispelled by a gun. Nor was the overwhelming sense of being an intruder, undesired and uninvited.
There were sudden footfalls, muffled but distinct, above their heads.