Beneath London
Authors: James P. Blaylock
Contents
One: Mr. Treadwell and Mr. Snips
Five: Mother Laswell’s Request
Nine: The London Metropolitan Police
Fourteen: The View from the River
Seventeen: The Gipsy Encampment
Twenty: Beaumont in the Morning
Twenty-Three: The Travails of Miss Bracken
Twenty-Four: Out of the Frying Pan
Twenty-Five: Bow Street Police Station
Twenty-Seven: Mr. Nobel’s Ingenious Dynamite
Twenty-Eight: Mr. Lewis at Work
Thirty-One: Three Severed Heads
Forty-Two: The Penultimate Ending
AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
Homunculus
Lord Kelvin’s Machine
The Aylesford Skull
Beneath London
Print edition ISBN: 9781783292608
Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783292615
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: June 2015
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This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
James P. Blaylock asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Copyright © 2015 James P. Blaylock
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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As ever, this book is for Viki
And for John and Danny, best of all possible sons
“Men do not change, they unmask themselves.”
MADAME DE STAEL
PROLOGUE
THE DARK REALMT
he distances that stretched away on three sides of the great cavern lay in perpetual half-darkness, with absolute darkness above, the invisible ceiling of the cavern supported by limestone columns as big around as forest oaks. Now and then Beaumont could discern the pale tips of stalactites overhead, conical shadows standing out against the darkness. He could hear the sound of ambitious bats skittering about, which meant that night was falling in the surface world. The ruins of a stone wall built in a long-forgotten time were just visible to the southeast, according to the compass that Beaumont carried in his pocket.
The track he followed ascended to a secret passage on Hampstead Heath very near the Highgate Ponds. It was a four-hour journey, and he intended to complete it before the moon rose over London. He rarely had need of a torch to find his way topside, although he carried one of his own making beneath his oilskin cloak, which he wore against the wet of the upper reaches where the underground London Rivers, the Tyburn and the Westbourne and the Fleet, leaked through their brick-and-mortar floor and through the cracks and crevices in the limestone below, forming other nameless rivers in the world beneath.
Behind him stood the stone dwelling to which his father had added a stick-and-thatch roof many years ago, the thatch well preserved in the dry air in this part of the underworld. The structure itself, which his father had called simply “the hut”, was built of stone blocks and was ancient beyond measure. Minutes ago it had been cheerful with lamplight. Beaumont had a plentiful supply of lamp oil in the hut, as well as food – jerk meat and salt pork and dried peas, and there was sometimes a feral pig to shoot, although no way to keep the meat fresh. It had to be butchered and hauled topside. It was a mistake to leave a pig carcass close by and so invite unwanted guests out of the darkness. He had seen the leviathan itself not far from this very spot when he was a lad, an immense reptile four fathoms in length with teeth around its snout like the tines of a harrow. Today he had left his rifle in the hovel, wrapped in oilcloth, along with several torches. He had no safe place to stow it topside, and no reason to carry it topside in any event.
The ground stretching away roundabout him glowed with a pale green luminosity now, reminding Beaumont of the wings of the moths that swarmed around gas lamps late at night in London alleys – “toad light”, Beaumont’s father had called the glow when he had first allowed Beaumont to accompany him to the underworld. The “toads” were in fact mushrooms, some of enormous girth and as tall as a grown man – much taller than Beaumont, who was a dwarf – although these monsters grew only in the deep, nether regions. The older, dried-out toads burned well and were plentiful enough for warmth and cooking both.
Those toads that were living glowed with an inner light, brighter on the rare occasions that they were freshly fed with meat, dim and small if they subsisted on the wet muck of the cavern floor. Fields of smaller toads grew in the shallows of the subterranean ponds where Beaumont sometimes fished. These were the brightest of the lot, dining on blind cavefish that swarmed in the depths. When he was a child, his father had told him that the toads were nasty-minded pookies, fashioned by elves at midnight, but Beaumont didn’t hold with elves. He had never seen one, neither in the underworld nor topside, and he had no reason to believe what he hadn’t seen with his own eyes.
After an hour of steady travel he entered a bright patch of toads, where he could check his pocket watch, which he had pinched from an old gent in Borough Market. It was past eight o’clock in the morning on the surface. He was weary of the darkness and the silence, which he had endured for three days now. He saw nearby a pool of water glowing with toad light. A misty cascade fell into it from the darkness above, geysering up in the center and casting out a circle of small waves. Despite his weariness, Beaumont stepped across the muddy fringe of the pool to look within – to do some fishing, as he thought of it, although not for the swimming variety of fish.
He had always been a lucky fisherman, as had his father been, finding castaway treasures that had fallen from the underground rivers and sewers that lay in the floor of the world above. There had been gold and silver rings aplenty, some with jewels, and all manner of coins, including crown and half-crown pieces and enough gold guineas to fill a leather bag, which was buried in the hut under rocks for safe keeping.
He took out a torch and used the stick end to shift the stones, and saw straightaway a fused ball of coins the size of a large orange. He waded out into the water and picked it up, then quickly waded back out again and shook the water from his oiled boots. Crouching by the edge of the pool, he broke up the ball of coins against a rock, swirling mud and debris from them, and carefully collecting them again from the bottom. He counted them as he did so: one hundred and forty-two Spanish doubloons. That they had come to this place was uncommonly strange: birds of a feather, mayhaps, the way they were gathered together. But they were clearly meant for Beaumont to find and no one else, which he knew absolutely because he had found them.
He stowed them away and set out again, moving upward along a muddy game trail that had been trodden flat by feral pigs, some of them prodigiously large, judging from their hoof-prints. But these prints were old enough. They didn’t signify. And pigs were a noisy lot that stank; they wouldn’t take him unawares.
Just as he was telling himself this, he saw the impression of a boot-print, half trodden out by the passing of the pigs. He stood still, unsettled in his mind. Rarely had he seen such a thing before, not this far beneath, not unless it was a print of his own boot, which this was not. He tried to recall how long had it been since he had taken this particular way to the surface – two years, perhaps. He moved on slowly, peering at the ground until he found a print of the toe of the boot, almost too faint to make out in the dim light, for the nearest cluster of toads was now a good way ahead of him. He had to be certain, however, of the thing that he feared – he was surprised to feel his heart beating so – and so he removed his cape and drew a torch out of his bundle, lighting the beeswax-soaked rope with a lucifer match and shading his eyes from the brightness.
