Posted by The Hooded Hood on July 05, 2001 at 20:28:23:
George Jeremiah
Waldegrave died on a grey November evening when he refused to give up the parcel
he was carrying to a knife-wielding robber. The assailant stabbed Waldegrave
four times in the chest and sternum and was long gone with the old man’s parcel
before the emergency services arrived. Waldergave was Dead on Arrival at the
Gothametropolis Mercy Hospital Trauma Unit. The locks on the door weren’t difficult to foil. The postman slipped into the
shadowed hallway and made his way for the study. He knew from plans he had
checked earlier what the layout of the old antebellum townhouse was. He moved
swiftly and silently to the study door, then paused. The choice was between slaughtering two undead scholars intent on
conservation or bringing down an evil corporation which would even resort to
murder to gain its ends. Messenger hadn’t really got any choice. Three days
later the Metrotrak project was put on hold indefinitely pending investigation
of certain documents which had come to light. A parallel investigation into a
confession of conspiracy by several key corporation personnel was hampered by
the disappearance of several other much-sought employees who were never found.
Ever.
Waldegrave’s nearest relative was
a distant niece in Seattle. When news of her uncle’s death reached her and she
arrived at her uncle’s townhouse she was horrified to discover it had been
ransacked. Police assumed opportunistic thieves had taken advantage of the news
of the old man’s passing. A note was circulated to antiquaries and book dealers
warning that a quantity of old volumes had been taken and that the Central
Precinct expected to be informed if any were offered for sale. The niece closed
up the house, the will went to probate, and everyone forgot about George
Waldegrave.
Almost everyone.
One figure had noted that the quiet old
scholar had taken an active interest in the campaign to stop the new
Gothametropolis Metrotrak, the modern supertram that would revolutionise travel
in the city and incidentally require the demolition of some of the oldest parts
of the venerable old town. That figure wondered just how good a historian
Waldegrave might have been, and what old deeds, covenants, and boundary
agreements he might have dug up that would make him a danger to a multi-million
dollar development deal. That figure was Messenger.
Something was wrong.
There was a strange musty smell which was more than a damp old house with the
heating turned off in winter. And there on the Persian rug was the muddy imprint
of a footmark – a naked footmark.
Messenger burst through the door to the
study, razor-letter in hand. As he saw the two creatures huddled over the desk
he loosed the deadly missile right into the nearest monster’s chest. The razor
letter sliced into the rotting creature’s torso with a rich squelch. It looked
in surprise at the sudden attack and complained, “I say, that was my best
shirt.”
“Zombies!” snarled Messenger, reaching for a parcel bomb. “I thought
I got all of you before.”
The second creature looked up sharply. “I beg your
pardon, sir, but we are not zombies, nor any other kind of ethnic
mindless shambling corpses. And I think you will find that it was we who got rid
of the last of that plague of tedious undead recently, not you.”
The parcel
bomb went undelivered – for now. “Who the hell are you?” the postman
demanded.
The second of the two creatures made a small bow but did not offer
his hand. He was the only undead Messenger had met that wore a comfy smoking
jacket and carpet slippers. His companion was the barefooted one with the
graveyard soil on his feet. “I am the Abyssal Greye, preceptor of the ghouls
below Gothametropolis, and this is my colleague. How do you do?”
“Ghouls.
Flesh eaters!”
“I imagine you eat flesh too,” the Abyssal suggested.
“But
not human flesh,” Messenger pointed out.
“On the long-standing cultural moré
that it is better to slaughter a living creature of another species than make
proper use of the dead flesh of one of our own kind,” the Abyssal Greye pointed
out. “Besides, we have the ability to assimilate knowledge by devouring the
brains of dead humans, and that’s a power no scholar is going to turn
down.”
“Ah. Brain-eating cannibal ghouls. I feel so much better now.”
“We
prefer to see ourselves as a living library of scholarship,” the ghoul answered.
“We are a cultural treasure.” He allowed himself a little scholarly joke. “I
suppose we are buried treasure,” he chuckled dryly.
“And I shouldn’t blow you
to hell because…?” Messenger demanded.
“Because as you can see we are not
devouring human brains at the moment, we are trying to make some sense out of
the mess this library has been left in.”
The postman considered this. “Why?”
he eventually asked.
“We’re trying to find out what they took and what can be
reconstructed,” the other ghoul explained. “There was quite a case against the
supertram before the villains got at it. Old rights of way, land restrictions,
questionable provenance of ownership. The legal wranglings would have delayed
the thing years, making it cost ineffective to proceed. We would have saved
Gothametropolis.”
“And that’s important to you?” Messenger checked.
“Of
course,” Abyssal Greye answered. “Some of our number helped build this city. We
aren’t going to allow crooked profiteers to destroy it for a fast buck. Besides,
they murdered poor Mr Waldegrave to ensure his silence, and that hardly seems
just.”
“How do you know it was murder?”
The second ghoul held up his hand.
“Well, actually, because the underground brotherhood dug up Waldegrave last
night and feasted on him. Now a large part of his consciousness is in me. I
suppose you could say I am Waldegrave now. How do you do?”
“You ate his
corpse?”
“It’s what I would have wanted,” the ghoul assured the postman. “An
extended lifetime in the company of like-minded scholars and historians
discussing the secrets of the ages is more than I could hope for.”
“So we
would really like for you to not decimate us, last of the Messengers,” Abyssal
Greye asked politely. “We’ve had the best interests of this city to heart for
many generations now. All we want to do is reconstruct the evidence those
ruffians took, stop the destruction of old Gothametropolis, and bring
Waldegrave’s murderers to justice.”
“By eating them,” the postman pointed
out.
“Good grief, no. We don’t want those cads in our collective memory,” the
Abyssal answered in shocked tones. “We thought we would kill them some other
way.”
“What way?” Messenger demanded.
“We thought we’d give you their
address,” Abyssal Greye answered slyly.
Messenger never saw the ghouls under Gothametropolis ever again, but he
often wondered when he read of the death of a prominent scholar or artist or
philosopher whether they too had joined the collective under the soil, the most
secret and gruesome of the city’s guardians.
And sometimes the postman
wondered whether they had more right to what they did than he did to do what he
had to.