Beneath London (20 page)

“And Ruhmkorff divided the light from the darkness,” he said aloud, looking around him to get the lay of the land, that which he could see. He calculated the angle of the rubble-covered hill in front of him – a fifteen percent gradient perhaps. It would be hard going if he tried to ascend straight up it, probably impossible, given that he would slide backward with every step. And if he fell and the lamp were damaged it would be very bad indeed. Still and all, in that direction – to the south – lay the Thames, arguably the most sensible direction for him to travel if he meant to search for Gilbert.

He put his hands to either side of his mouth and shouted, “Hello!” and then listened for a reply, which came at once: the cry of a seagull, however, and not of a man. The bird swooped into view and landed nearby, drawn by the lamplight and perhaps his voice. “Good morning,” he said to it, wondering whether it was the good-luck bird that had honored him with a gift just a short time ago. He shouted again and then a third time, but there was no answer. His voice sounded strangely deadened, as if it carried no great distance at all.

He removed the compass from his pocket and opened the case. He knew that he was on the north side of the river, and unless the tumble had entirely turned him around, he was somewhere downriver from the sink-hole, although no great distance, certainly. As for searching for Gilbert, his best effort would be to shout at regular intervals, like a ship ringing a bell in heavy fog. He would travel west, he decided, rather than attempt a direct ascent, and do his best to keep track of the distance he traveled if he had any hope of finding his way back to the sink-hole by dead-reckoning.

The gull took wing now and disappeared in the darkness overhead. It would have a bird’s-eye view of St. Ives in his bubble of light, but St. Ives would be blind to it unless it descended again. He suddenly felt tolerably conspicuous, as if spotlighted on a stage, and he was anxious to be moving. He set out across the hillside, leaving behind the field of mushrooms and taking his bearings often, shouting Gilbert’s name when he did so. He shifted slightly downward with each sliding step, leaning into the slope in order to avoid falling. The traverse seemed to take a great deal of time, and it was impossible to tell exactly how far he had traveled, the lamp only shining so far into the darkness. The ground finally grew more stable, and was studded with immovable mineral formations, like sharply bent knees protruding from the sand: stalagmites in various stages of development.

Here the ground had little of the loose scree of the cave-in, and St. Ives began climbing upward and across it, making real progress. A forest of mature stalagmites slowly grew visible ahead of him, and he moved in among them, seeing here and there the conical tips of stalactites descending from above, hanging ghost-like in the dark void.

A movement in the gloom ahead brought him up short – a large creature of some sort, or a man crawling on his knees. For a moment he ceased breathing. The creature moved out from behind a stalagmite now, and he saw then that it was a brindle goat, which saw him as well and scurried off into the darkness, quickly disappearing.

Had he imagined it? Were his wits astray? It was useless to speculate, and in any event a goat was no less likely to be wandering about in the underworld than was an auk – considerably more likely, perhaps. It stood to reason that if a goat had found its way in, St. Ives could find his way out. Very soon, however, the way was blocked by an almost vertical wall of limestone, chalk-white in the lamplight. It was deeply fissured by little rills of water, and he was thankful for the rubber-soled Monticello boots, the wet limestone beneath his feet being dangerously slippery.

The wall, reaching into invisibility overhead, compelled him to travel even farther westward along a narrow track of stone that seemed to him to have been leveled and broadened in some past age. He could see what looked like the scars of picks or chisels – the work of enterprising Romans, or perhaps of a civilization even more ancient. He wished to God that Gilbert’s man from the
Times
could have come along. Six good photographs would be utterly convincing. St. Ives’s testimony, on the other hand, would be explained away as madness due to the lump on his head.

He rounded a bend and found himself on a narrow landing, looking down into a steep-walled defile cut by a waterfall that rushed along sixty feet below. Stone stairs led away downwards along the edge of the waterfall. They were unmistakable stairs, not a mere quirk of geology, some of them cut out of the solid limestone, some of them enlarged by cleverly placed cut stones so tightly fitted together that he could only just make out the joints in the nearest of them. The track that he had been following also led away upward, perhaps to the surface. He would have to choose: up or down.

Far below him he saw the illumination of a vast field of the strange mushrooms – very much the sort of light emitted from the female glow-worm or from within the bodies of luminescent squid. He drew out his brass, achromatic telescope, a finely crafted quadruple-tube instrument, which revealed a broadening-out of the canyon below him into a landscape of rectilinear shapes: gravestones or crypts, perhaps, or stone huts.

He peered at this phenomenon for some time, dumbfounded. He was convinced that he knew just where he was: somewhere beneath Blackfriars. He had seen these structures before – not something
similar
, but this very thing – when the ground had split open in the floor of the Cathedral of the Oxford Martyrs and Ignacio Narbondo had fallen to his doom. The fissure had revealed a clear view of the underworld that had closed again on the instant, and the brief image of it had been fixed in St. Ives’s memory. As the months passed he had come to doubt what he had seen, for that long afternoon had been very like a dream. There was no doubting it now.

Moving slowly in deference to his ribs, he reached behind him and drew a canteen of water and a newspaper-wrapped packet of food from his knapsack. He sat down and leaned back against a dry section of the limestone wall and unwrapped a sandwich of ham, mustard, and pickled onions, realizing that he was both thirsty and famished. Presently the seagull appeared once again, alighting very nearby and looking greedily at the sandwich. The gull hopped closer, and St. Ives tore off a piece of crust and tossed it to the creature, who caught it neatly and gulped it down.

St. Ives considered the great cavern below. He might well have been eating his sandwich on the second or third level of a vast house with a section of floor removed. The steep passage between the levels had no doubt been carved out by the flow of water over countless eons, dissolving the limestone strata. The entire void beneath London had surely been excavated this same way: surface water from the many rivers and from endless seasons of rain trickling down through the limestone, patiently eating away solid rock. The wonder laid out beneath him was an open invitation complete with an accommodating stairway. It was clearly his scientific duty to consider this an opportunity rather than an inconvenience and to proceed deeper into the underworld.

He pitched a fragment of ham in the direction of the seagull and then reached for the smeared newspaper that lay on the ground beside him. The seagull snatched the ham out of the air and gobbled it down, and in the same moment it lunged at the newspaper, plucking it away and flapping its wings wildly, launching into the air and flying out of sight carrying its greasy prize. Seagulls were the thieves of the bird world, St. Ives thought, which, alas, entirely accounted for their temporary gestures of friendship.

He stood up, found that his balance was still sound and took one last look through the telescope. After hollering Gilbert’s name and hearing no response, he started downward, counting the steps while idly considering the irrationality of ascribing human emotions to animals – the loyal dog, the inscrutable cat, the wise owl. Perhaps greed, he thought, was the essential foundation of human behavior as well. Perhaps love was merely biological in origin, and selflessness a mere illusion fabricated to put a good face on what was in fact self-serving. The idea didn’t appeal to him, however, and his musings were interrupted when he saw, on a rock ledge some twelve feet below him, a black pistol with a fat barrel. It lay on a flat outcropping below the sheer edge of the staircase.

Here was yet another item that he had seen before. Narbondo had carried just such an unlikely and deadly weapon, which had fallen into the void moments before Narbondo had done the same. He considered the wisdom of attempting to retrieve it, but dismissed the idea as far too risky. Another dozen stairs farther along, the lamplight revealed a dark stain on the pale limestone. He stepped past it, down three more steps, then turned and knelt on the stone in order to get a better look at it. The stain was almost certainly blood, long dried. He couldn’t think of an alternative explanation for it. He turned carefully, stood up, and resumed his descent, soon discovering more blood – what had been a considerable pool of it – and bloody boot-prints on the three steps below it. One of the boot prints very clearly revealed a pattern of hobnails that formed a pentagram.

There could be no question at all: Ignacio Narbondo, injured, had descended this flight of stairs a little over a year past. St. Ives was doubtful that the man had returned to the surface, for if he had he would have sought revenge against St. Ives and his family. Narbondo was scarcely human, motivated by a bloody-minded joy that he took in human suffering. St. Ives discovered that his scientific curiosity in the underworld had diminished now. That Narbondo might be alive – or the more optimistic possibility, that St. Ives might find the man’s corpse – had become an unavoidable distraction.

Soon he came out onto the floor of the great cavern, which was sectioned off with high walls of limestone and pools of standing water. Patches of mushroom grew down into pools, illuminating the depths. There were enormous knee-high clumps that cast a substantial light, the air fetid with their odor. The geometric shapes that he had seen from above – stone ruins, perhaps – were hidden now, but were no far distance away. He stood for a moment tempted by them, but suppressed the temptation. If he found a way out to the surface world he could return to investigate the underworld more thoroughly, the Board of Works be damned. And if he could
not
find a way out, then he would become a denizen of this world and could investigate it at his leisure – or until he went mad, the fate of many maroons.

A clear path, much-traveled, imprinted with hoof-prints and what looked like the remnants of a boot-print, led away uphill toward the north-west, and St. Ives set out in that direction, moving at a steady pace. He considered what he knew of London’s underground rivers, which were quite likely the source of the subterranean water that was now in evidence all around him. The Fleet, he knew, rose near Highgate Ponds on Hampstead Heath, and the Westbourne and the Tyburn very nearby in West Hampstead. He had been inside the tunnel through which the Westbourne flowed, and had seen the iron doors and ladders that led to tributary streams and sewer tunnels on yet lower levels.

As he moved along, he passed a number of pools filled with carpets of the glowing fungi, very apparently carnivorous, for they were often in the act of imprisoning both blind cave-fish and milky-white salamanders, all of their victims apparently alive or in stasis. He wondered whether the fungi lived in some state of symbiosis with the creatures they caught. If they did, the advantage was entirely with the fungi, for the trapped animals clearly suffered a variety of living death, whereas the fungi were quite monstrously alive. Floating duckweed grew in profusion in the light of the mushrooms, as if their luminescence was as potent as sunlight. The hoof-prints of goats and pigs were visible in the mud along the shore.

Spotting a black strip of fabric several feet from the path, he recognized it as the wide belt of the cassock that Narbondo had been wearing when he had entered the Cathedral, carrying the infernal device with which to blow them all to kingdom come. Some distance farther on he discovered the cassock itself, bloodstained, the dried gore visible against the black cloth. The man had apparently discarded encumbering garments as his strength gave out.

St. Ives traveled onward, into a country of ever-larger fungi, with caps as round and broad as pub tables. They dipped nearly to the ground, some of them, and glowed ever the more brightly when they were in possession of fresh meat, birds and bats for the most part, and the occasional rat. Again, most of the animals were still alive in some sense of the word, or at least had failed to decay. He entered a forest of head-high fungi with enormous trunks. The light emanating from them was quite bright – bright enough so that the light from his lamp was consumed by it. It seemed to him that the fungi bowed toward him as he passed, an uneasy thing to be sure, and he kept carefully to the depression trod into the soil by countless passing creatures over the years.

As an experiment, he touched a finger to the jade-colored gills of a large fungus, which immediately sucked at his skin like an anemone, the cap pulling backward as if in an attempt to draw him into the thicket. He jerked his hand away, a flap of luminous gill coming away with his finger, stuck tightly to his flesh, and he felt a tingling sensation, like oncoming paralysis. Hurriedly he scraped his hand on the metal fixture of the lamp where it attached to his belt, scrubbing the fungus from his skin before taking out a magnifying glass and studying the gills more carefully. He was surprised to see that they were lined with tiny suction cups or disk-like mouths – predatory creatures, to be sure.

A short distance farther on, he was stopped by a strange sight – a broad swath of fungi that had been severed very near the ground, cut out in a neat rectangular box-shape nearly a fathom or so on each side. St. Ives stood and stared at the phenomenon, contemplating what it meant. Narbondo’s boot prints had been scarce along the trail, trodden out by the animals that had come and gone in his wake. Now there were a plethora of human footprints that obscured the animal prints, very recent, apparently: a party of men who had come down the trail from above. There were the indentations of wheels along with the boot-prints, as if they had brought along a cart on which to haul out their treasure, or so it seemed to St. Ives – a treasure of flesh and bone and luminous fungi.