Dawn of the Dreadfuls Page 17

  In the pot were the bloody, mashed remnants of a human brain.

  Despite all she’d seen the past few weeks, Elizabeth blanched and looked away. She tried to hide her revulsion by pretending she was merely retrieving her katana.

  No more than a minute before, she’d felt invincible. Yet now that seemed so long ago she could barely believe it ever happened, and all she could feel was disgust—as much for the pride that had momentarily blinded her as for the grotesque lumps of flesh clotting the chamber pot.

  “Your bait, Doctor,” she said, careful to keep her voice from wavering. “Is it what I think it is?”

  THE THING FLAILED AT HER, WAILING, YET IT COULD COME NO CLOSER.

  Dr. Keckilpenny nodded. “Every zombie’s favorite delicacy. Nothing but the real thing would do, so I brought along my own supply. Don’t ask me where I got it. Suffice it to say, the first thing one learns in medical college is how to acquire one’s own specimens.”

  “And now you have another.” Elizabeth turned to the slavering dreadful writhing on the ground nearby, its arms stretched out to paw uselessly at the muck and leaves between them. “What do you propose to do with it?”

  “I propose,” Dr. Keckilpenny said, the old gleam firing up again in his eyes, “to turn ‘it’ back into a ‘him.’”

  __________________

  CHAPTER 26

  AFTER SOME QUICK (and, thanks again to Jane, courteous) debate, a subject was settled on for the experiment the Reverend Mr. Cummings had agreed to. Since it wouldn’t do to unduly disturb a respectable member of the community, the party would remove itself to a far corner of the parish grounds and pay a call on a connectionless pauper woman who’d been planted there three months before. This had the added benefit of seclusion, the gravesite being further removed from the road.

  All the same, before a single spade bit into the earth, Mr. Bennet insisted that the tent canvases the troops had brought be strung up around the grave.

  “It wouldn’t do to have our trial here observed,” he explained while the soldiers argued over the best spots to pound in their tent pegs. “We have been spared panic in Meryton, thanks to complacency and ignorance. It is to our advantage to preserve that just a little longer, if we can.”

  “In my experience, complacency and ignorance usually do a fine job preserving themselves,” Lord Lumpley yawned, idly eyeing Jane as he leaned against a mausoleum nearby. “But if you feel you must put up your little dressing screens …”

  “Why, though, Father?” Jane asked. “What advantage could come from hiding the truth?”

  “He wishes to avoid another Birmingham,” Ensign Pratt chirped. The junior officer was doing his best to loom up over his men as they began hammering pegs into the ground, but given his size, looming over anything larger than a dachshund was an impossibility. “People fleeing in huge mobs, clogging the roads, falling prey to the dreadful swarms.”

  “Not just falling prey to them. Feeding them.” Mr. Bennet gave Ensign Pratt an approving nod. “I’m glad to know you’re old enough to have at least read of The Troubles.”

  “Might have a hard time putting up those tents, Sir,” one of the soldiers reported. He waved his hammer at a peg he’d just pummeled into the turf with one blow. “Ground here’s all marshy like.”

  “I’m sure they’ll hold, Roper. Carry on.” The ensign looked over at Mr. Bennet. “At least it will make for quick digging.”

  “That it will,” Mr. Bennet said, poking a toe into the spongy sod. “For everyone.”

  He threw his daughter a somber glance that moved her hand to her sword.

  Ensign Pratt frowned, but Mr. Cummings didn’t even seem to notice anything was amiss, for he’d been busy leafing through his Book of Common Prayer in search of something appropriate for such an uncommon occasion.

  Lord Lumpley, on the other hand, couldn’t help but notice, given that his eyes rarely strayed from Jane. He straightened up and began backing away from the others.

  “Well, now that we’ve got this under way, no doubt there are other matters I could be attending to around the village. Perhaps Miss Bennet and I might—”

  “Hello,” Roper said, seemingly speaking to the tuft of grass he was kneeling over. “One of my pegs is coming back out.”

  “What’s that you say?” Ensign Pratt asked, moving over to take a look.

  “I would advise stepping back, gentlemen,” Mr. Bennet said.

  “Yeah … right you are, sir,” Roper said—just as a hand burst from the earth, a tent peg piercing the palm. Gray fingers clamped themselves around the man’s ankle.

  Roper shrieked immediately and with much enthusiasm.

  “Fire! Fire!” Ensign Pratt squealed, leaping away pointing at the hand—and now wrist and forearm—jutting up from the ground.

  Roper tried to flee, but the fingers remained locked on tightly. All he could do was limp in circles, screaming, as his fellow soldiers scrambled to collect their muskets, which had been propped up in a neat pyramid several yards away.

  “There’s no time for that,” Mr. Bennet said. “Jane, your katana, quickly. Lord Lumpley, Mr. Cummings, if you would kindly help me steady Private Roper.”

  “Ummm,” came the baron’s reply.

  The vicar instinctively began reading aloud from the book in his hands.

  “D-dearly b-b-beloved, we are g-gathered together here in sight of G-G-God, and in the face of this congregation, to j-join together this man and this woman in holy mmmmmatrimony …”

  “Wrong verse, Mr. Cummings,” Jane said, and once her father stepped in to stop Roper—alone—she took out her sword and cut him free.

  Mr. Bennet helped the soldier hobble away from the slime-oozing stump left sticking out of the ground, at which point a soldier ran up and shot it, to no discernible effect.

  When Roper looked down and saw the rotten, ragged-fleshed hand still holding fast to his ankle, he began screaming all over again.

  “There, there, lad. Pull yourself together.” Mr. Bennet patted him on the shoulder. “As long as you’re not attached to the part with the mouth, you’ve nothing to—”

  “Papa!”

  Another hand had thrust up from the ground to grab hold of Jane. It was directly behind her, clasping the hem of her gown, and there was no way she could turn to get a clean swing at it.

  “Fire! Fire!” Ensign Pratt cried again.

  Several of his men rushed over and pointed their muskets in the general vicinity of Jane’s feet.

  “No!” Mr. Bennet bellowed.

  “Fire! Fire!”

  Up till now, Lord Lumpley had been too shocked to do more than gawk. Yet something—pure irritation with the unworthies around him, perhaps—broke through his horror.

  “Oh, shut up, you poxy-faced git!” he roared. “You won’t help the lady by shooting her damned legs off!”

  The soldiers froze. Not only did the nobleman have a point, they were unsure how to react when their commander was called a “poxy-faced git.” The situation, like so many they’d faced of late, hadn’t been covered in their training.

  “His Lordship is quite right,” Mr. Bennet said, and he unsheathed his sword, waved the soldiers away, and cut off the hand grasping his daughter’s dress.

  “I am not poxy faced,” the ensign mumbled, throwing Lord Lumpley a petulant glare.

  “Well,” Mr. Bennet sighed, “it appears the vicar’s permission wasn’t necessary, after all. The dead are nearly done disinterring themselves.”

  Two oozing, squirming stumps now poked out of the soil. Directly between them, a small mound was forming as something new sought to bloom.

  “‘Th-this is translated c-closely from the following prayer in the Sacramentariam of S-Saint Gregory,’” Mr. Cummings said, glassy eyes glued to his book, “‘which is presented to the reader that he may j-judge the manner in which our Reformers made use of the liturgical commmmmpositions of this gr-great mmmmm-man.’”

  “I think you’re reading footnotes n
ow, Mr. Cummings,” Jane said with remarkable gentleness, considering that she was, at the time, endeavoring to pry a hand off the hem of her dress with the point of a sword.

  “Let the vicar read what he would,” her father told her. “I doubt if anyone could find the perfect prayer for consecrating this.”

  He knelt down near the flailing stubs. They were wriggling their way farther from the earth while the little swelling between grew larger.

  Any second now, the top of the dreadful’s head was going to break the surface.

  “Obviously, I have miscalculated,” Mr. Bennet said. “Usually one can count on a steady rate of one-and-one-half feet per week, but our friend here is arriving ahead of schedule. Perhaps my mistake was in backdating from Mr. Ford’s conversion, when the plague might have in fact arrived much sooner. Ahhh, well. It’s not my first mistake, and I can only hope it won’t be my last.” He shrugged and turned to the soldiers clumped together nearby. “If someone would be so kind as to fetch one of the smithy’s hammers, please. So that I might make a demonstration.”

  Half the soldiers whirled away to do as he asked, desperate for any excuse to put distance between themselves and the unmentionable about to sprout like some ghastly flower. The other half simply stared with their mouths agape.

  “Papa, we are being watched.” Jane nodded at the road. “By Mrs. Long and her nieces, I believe.”

  “Then it may as well be all Meryton, I’m afraid.” Mr. Bennet waved to their far-off audience. “Hello, there! Just enjoying a lovely little morning picnic! Would you care to join us?”

  The women scurried off down the lane.

  One of Ensign Pratt’s men returned with a heavy black hammer just as the ground split open to reveal a tuft of mud-clogged hair.

  “Thank you.” Mr. Bennet took the hammer but made no move to use it. “Tell me, My Lord—I find I’ve lost track of the social calendar. The spring ball at Pulvis Lodge is set for tomorrow night, is it not?”

  A scaly forehead, alive with writhing worms, rose out of the moist loam, as did the sound of low, muffled moaning. Yet still Mr. Bennet remained crouched mere feet away, doing nothing.

  “The ball, you say?” The baron looked back and forth from the unmentionable to Mr. Bennet, seemingly unsure which he found more alarming. “Yes, yes—tomorrow, it is. Do you wish it canceled?”

  More soil crumbled aside, and eyebrows became visible. They were followed a moment later by the eyes themselves—bloodshot, bulging, and wild with hate or hunger or both.

  “Quite the contrary,” Mr. Bennet said. “I merely think it should be moved to a new venue. Someplace larger affording better protection for the guests.”

  “Aren’t you going to do something about that?” Ensign Pratt yelped, pointing at the dreadful wriggling its way from the grave. The thing’s nose (what was left of it) was now above ground, and the handless arms were visible up to the elbows.

  “When the moment is right,” Mr. Bennet said.

  Mr. Cummings began reading aloud from what appeared to be the prayer book’s introduction.

  “It has been the awwww-bject of the editor in preparing for the public the present edition to increase the utility of our admirable l-lliturgy by rendering it more generally and completely unnnnnnderstood… .”

  “Are you saying you want me to host the ball?” the baron said. “You press your luck, Bennet.”

  “Indeed, I do.”

  The head was now out far enough to reveal the chalky, desiccated face of an old woman. The unmentionable’s contortions were growing wilder as the dirt loosened around it, and the ground began to swell up where its shoulders would, before long, pop up into the sunshine.

  “Under normal circumstances,” Mr. Bennet said, “I could deny a man such as yourself nothing, My Lord. Yet these are hardly normal circumstances, I think you’ll agree, and I find instead that I must ask of you absolutely everything.”

  “I say!” Ensign Pratt cried, his voice cracking. He seemed to be working very, very hard to hold in a “Fire!” “Could you settle this matter another time, perhaps?”

  The dreadful’s moaning had turned to snuffling snarls as its mouth approached the surface. For reasons knowable only to itself, the creature seemed to find Mr. Cummings the most appetizing of all those present, and it locked its bugged-out eyes on the vicar and began jerking its head back and forth, chomping at mud in its eagerness to feast on flesh.

  “All right. I suppose she’s out far enough,” Mr. Bennet said. “Jane, Ensign, men—observe.”

  He hefted the blacksmith’s hammer and brought it down on the unmentionable’s crown. The whole skull exploded in a spray of pulp and bone, and the zombie instantly stopped its struggling, half its head splattered on the ground, the other half on Mr. Bennet’s breeches.

  “Ahhh … note for next time,” Mr. Bennet said. “I forgot to take us by the butcher’s. You’ll probably want to procure suitable aprons before you proceed. It would be a shame to sully such splendid, spotless new uniforms with … oh.”

  Ensign Pratt had sullied his splendid, spotless new uniform by fainting.

  “‘Next t-time’?” Mr. Cummings muttered as the soldiers propped up their fallen officer and fanned him with their hats. The clergyman’s prayer book had slipped from his fingers and lay splayed on the ground, forgotten. “‘Proceed’?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Cummings, but surely you can see my father and the captain were correct,” Jane said. “Everyone laid to rest in the old way the last few years will have to be dealt with.”

  HE HEFTED THE BLACKSMITH’S HAMMER AND BROUGHT IT DOWN ON THE UNMENTIONABLE’S CROWN.

  By “the old way,” of course, she meant unbeheaded.

  The vicar stumbled, rested a hand atop a headstone for support and then, when he saw what he was leaning on, jerked away.

  “How many of those markers have you added here since the Burial Act was repealed?” Mr. Bennet asked him. “Twenty? Thirty? If you can’t recall, you need not worry: Soon enough an exact count will be easy indeed. Fancy caskets might last a little longer in the ground, but they won’t hold what lies within them forever.”

  “I suppose it’s t-t-true… . God help us… .” Mr. Cummings dared a glance at the dark circle of gore around the now-motionless unmentionable. “This calls for suh-suh-ssssssswift action.” He straightened his black frock coat with a trembly tug, then turned and tottered off toward the vicarage. “I shall write my bishop immediately.”

  “Excuse me?” Mr. Bennet said.

  “I l-l-lack the authority to approve a m-m-mass disinterment,” Mr. Cummings muttered as he shuffled away. “I must consult with the head of the d-d-diocese … perhaps even the archbishop himmmmself. But I will state the matter’s urgency in no uncertain terms, you may rest assured.”

  “Get your head out of your cassock, you fool!” Lord Lumpley called after him. “There’s no time for any of that!”

  Jane slipped swiftly past the baron, catching up to Mr. Cummings in but a few, fleet-footed strides.

  “You look weak.” She wrapped an arm around the man’s waist. “Allow me to help, Mr. Cummings.”

  In a blink, she was behind him, her other arm crooked around his neck.

  She’d seen the Panther’s Kiss performed only once, but she was a very attentive pupil.

  The vicar squirmed weakly, sagged, then dropped to the ground.

  “Oh, dear,” Jane said. “It appears Mr. Cummings has fainted, just like Ensign Pratt.”

  “Well, I suppose the grass here is as soft as any bed. We’ll just let him rest on”—Mr. Bennet peered at the headstone marking the plot Mr. Cummings was stretched out upon—“Mrs. Foreman until his nerves recover. She was buried during The Troubles, so I don’t suppose the lady will be raising any objections. And while our friend the vicar is recuperating, we might as well carry on with our labors here. He did call for swift action before he went all woozy and incomprehensible.” He turned one of his dry little smirks on Lord Lumpley. “Isn’t tha
t right?”

  “Yes. Quite,” the baron grated out. “Though it does make me curious. If I should refuse to host the ball at Netherfield—which I assume you wish me to do for some devious reason all your own—will I suddenly find myself becoming ‘woozy and incomprehensible,’ as well?”

  “Oh, I can’t imagine that, my Lord.” Jane turned and started walking toward the baron. “Your constitution seems quite sound. If not for your rather strongly worded intervention when the dreadful took hold of me, I suspect I’d now be stretched out on the ground like Mr. Cummings and Ensign Pratt.” She stopped directly before Lord Lumpley and held his gaze for a long moment with no hint of a blush to her cheeks. “No, the only thing you should suffer should you decline, I think, would be the loss of an opportunity to dance with me and my sister, for as you know we would not be welcome at Pulvis Lodge.”

  Behind her, Mr. Bennet shifted uneasily, jaw clenching. He might have assigned this role to his daughter, but he was troubled now to see how well she could play it.

  Lord Lumpley noticed—and was pleased.

  “Well, since you put it like that, the matter is settled,” he said. “You and I must return to Netherfield at once, Miss Bennet. Balls don’t throw themselves, you know, and I’m certain you will soon prove yourself ever so helpful with mine.”

  __________________

  CHAPTER 27

  IT WAS OBVIOUS to Mary that the Master was distracted. He’d run through half a dozen new stances with her and Kitty and Lydia that morning, yet his drills had been slow, sloppy. Usually, he moved with an especially animated grace, almost a delight, when Mr. Bennet wasn’t around, as if (Mary conjectured) he didn’t want to show the older man up. But not now. Why, he didn’t even bother taking off his coat and vest (something Mary was able to note without acknowledging how disappointed this made her).

  Things didn’t improve when the Master switched to weapons practice. He started off trying to instruct the girls in the art of throwing bolas (“the ancient Patagonian balls of death,” he called them), but he could hardly even get his swinging, and when they ended up in a bunch around the post in the center of the dojo, he gave up entirely with a grunt of disgust.