Legion of the Dead

by Paul Stewart

  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 grave
yard.

  ‘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.

  For a moment they shuddered and trembled, teeth and bones rattling in a hideous percussive dance. Then, in an instant, like the shutting off of a current, the brilliant light cut out, and with it, a ghostly sigh rose from the legion of the dead. And, as I watched, the entire multitude crumbled to dust and blew away in a billowing cloud.

  Last to go were the colour party, released at last from their deathly captivity. Before me, in the remains of her shattered sarcophagus, Lady Sienna de Vere crumbled into a pile of disconnected bones.

  Faced with the dark jewel’s display of extraordinary power, I understood its awesome secret. Where the golden sword, now shattered and in pieces, had had the power to raise and enslave the dead, this black jewel had released them and returned them to eternal rest.

  Kneeling, I turned Sir Alfred over and brushed marble dust from his face, to be greeted by two sightless eyes staring back at me. The young doctor came dashing across the grass from the house, the shattered rifle butt grasped in his hand. I looked up at him.

  ‘It’s all over,’ I said.

  He knelt down beside his father.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, looking round at me, tears in his eyes. ‘It’s all over.’

  The true nature of the mysterious power that was at work that night I can only guess at.

  What I did witness though, was the supernatural influence that the statue of the demon goddess, Kal-Ramesh, exerted on all who came in contact with it.

  When they escaped from their prison cave, the colour sergeant and his corporals were drawn to seek out the black jewel – the third eye of Kal-Ramesh – embarking on a journey by dug-out canoe that took them from the lamprey-infested waters of the East to the mudflats of Gatling Quays. They carried with them the instrument of their enslavement, the sixth sword of the goddess. As to how long they must have rowed, riding the ocean currents as they were drawn ever onwards by the black jewel, I can only guess at.

  Arriving in this great bustling city of ours, they abandoned their primitive canoe on the mudflats and took refuge in the Gatling Sump. With a twisted logic, the colour party did what they did best. Drawn to graves decorated with winged angels, they used the golden sword to recruit an army – a legion of the dead – to serve beneath the banner of the Fighting 33rd, the Angel of Victory on a blue field. Finally, they homed in on the eye of the goddess, mustering their ghastly troops in the city’s sewers for an invasion of the de Vere mansion and its private burial grounds.

  And found peace.

  A peace of sorts also returned to Gatling Quays, especially after I laid the whole incredible tale out before Thump McConnell and his fellow gang leaders. Argumentative and brutal they may be, but the quaysiders are a superstitious lot. And I’ve got to say their eyes lit up when they heard about that cave somewhere back there in the East, with three caskets of treasure waiting to be found.

  Good luck to any who find it, I say. I’d had enough of six-armed goddesses with eyes in their foreheads to last me a lifetime.

  Speaking of which, that strange jewel, the last remnant of the statue of Kal-Ramesh, was buried with Lady Sienna de Vere in a new tomb, joined this time by poor Sir Alfred. He’d had no idea what he was dealing with when he had the strange eye-catching jewel from his treasure trove set in a tiara for his beautiful wife. Perhaps she sensed something of its mysterious power for, according to her son, the young doctor, it had been her favourite piece of jewellery.

  Dr Lawrence de Vere closed up the mansion and moved away soon after the events of that terrible night. Not that I blame him. In my opinion, some memories, like people, should remain buried. Before he went though, he paid a visit to the Goose and Gullet, where he met an old soldier of my acquaintance, who had fallen on hard times. I don’t like to boast, but suffice it to say that Blindside Bailey now has a pension that means he can buy his own tankards of ale.

  As for myself, three weeks later, I found myself highstacking over to St Jude’s hospital with my good friend and promising high-stacker, Will Farmer.

  He had a drop to make.

  I was in search of an angel of mercy, two tickets to the upper circle of the Alhambra Music Hall burning a hole in my pocket.

  One moment I was standing there, sword raised, knees trembling. The next, in a blur of fur and fury, the hellish creature was flying towards me, its huge front paws extended and savage claws aiming straight at my hammering heart …

  Barnaby Grimes is a tick-tock lad – he’ll deliver any message anywhere any time. As fast as possible. Tick-tock - time is money! But strange things are afoot. One moonlit night, as Barnaby highstacks above the city, leaping from roof to roof, gutter to gable, pillar to pediment, a huge beast attacks. He barely escapes with his life. And now his friend Old Benjamin has disappeared …

  A gloriously macabre tale in a breathtaking new series, packed with intrigue, horror and fantastic illustrations.

  My grip tightened on the cruel stone knife, the blade glinting, as the b
lood-red ruby eyes of the grinning skull bore into mine. Inside my head, the voice rose to a piercing scream. ‘Cut out his beating heart – and give it to me!’

  Barnaby Grimes is a tick-tock lad on a mission - to collect a parcel from the docks and deliver it to a famous school. But dark forces have been released and, as Barnaby returns to Grassington Hall School, he is about to find out the full extent of the horror.

  A spine-tingling tale of a school in the grip of a terrible curse. Tick-tock, time is running out. Can Barnaby survive?

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  Quint is a new student at the Knights Academy, struggling to survive the icy cold of a never-ending winter, and the ancient feuds that threaten Sanctaphrax.

  CLASH OF THE SKY GALLEONS

  Quint finds himself caught up in his father’s fight for revenge against the man who killed his family. They are drawn into a deadly pursuit, a pursuit that will ultimately lead to the clash of the great sky galleons.

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