Tight, he thought. This is so very tight.
And the fear rose in him again, but he swallowed it down, thinking, You are the Great Savano. Darkness is a magician’s friend.
This notion was helpful, and soon Riley heard a squelch as his feet touched the sewer floor.
Don’t think about that noise, he told himself. Or the ungodly stench. Just remember that Chevie needs you to be brave.
It wasn’t really fair to take issue with the smell. After all, he had climbed of his own volition into a sewer tunnel and that was where the smell belonged. He was the interloper here.
He sensed the space opening up around him, and heard the gurgle stretch out, an invisible ribbon in the darkness.
I still draw breath, he thought. Though I would prefer not to.
Malarkey made a big job of his climb. Grunting and cursing the ladder for a useless stretch of iron, fit only for children and dwarfs. Riley could feel the heat of him filling the chamber, and he stepped aside just as King Otto thumped down beside him.
“I ain’t missed this one jot,” he said, fumbling in his haversack for a lantern and matches. “A person ain’t human down here, or perhaps human is all he is. Ain’t no room for put-ons or graces down in the pit.”
Malarkey struck up the lamp, casting a cone of sickly light ahead of them down the sewer tunnel. Dark furred things squeaked their alarm and skittered from the light. They seemed to Riley too big to be rats.
“What moves, King Otto?” he asked. “What squeaks?”
Otto laughed. “They is rats, right enough, but they seem bigger. You is suffering from what they calls tunnel vision. Everything nasty seems enlarged to gargantuan proportions.” Otto squinted ahead into the darkness. “Except that one. He is indeed a giant.”
Riley gazed down the tunnel with its weeping walls and dripping stalactites. A monster rat sat on his hind paws bang in the center of the sewage stream, his teeth like candle flames.
He will move, thought Riley. Surely he will quit his post.
But no, King Rat stood his ground, whiskers twitching in the lamplight.
“That one’s a sentry,” whispered Otto. “He’s giving us fair warning.”
Riley whispered back. “Ain’t he afraid?”
“What? Of the likes of you and me? Ask yerself: which of us is more suited to this environment? Which of us can summon a million of his pals with a couple of squeaks?”
“So, what do we do? Quit altogether?”
Malarkey pushed Riley ahead of him. “No, we walks slowly by and don’t look him in his milky beadies, and hopefully Mr. Rat will grant us safe passage. And anyway, it ain’t the rats you got to fret about in the stinkpipe.”
Riley decided he would circle around to that last statement shortly, but for now his mind was bent to the task of not doing the Hoxton Shuffle, so named for the involuntary gesticulations of one particularly energetic inmate of Hoxton House lunatic asylum.
Stay calm, he told himself. You are on a mission. You have seen worse things than an oversized rat.
This was true, but thinking on those worse things made Riley believe that they might be concealed in the shadows, shifting themselves to avoid the lantern beam.
They went to both sides of the rat, following the path of the sewage that parted at his paws, with the exception of the solids that lumped and piled around his midriff in an eerie facsimile of a sentry’s box. The rat twitched a mite at their passage but otherwise paid them no mind.
“What ho,” breathed Malarkey. “King Rat does not sniff a threat.”
The sewer tunnel curved gently, and the pale light picked out edges and grooves in the stonework. Several areas of the ceiling had collapsed inward, exposing dark earth above that writhed with roots and worms. In some places blessed light penetrated from above, and Riley welcomed its warmth on his face even though its presence meant the tunnel was not sound.
“Onward, boy,” Otto urged him when he dawdled. “Ain’t no time now for moon-facing. We got destruction to wreak.”
Earlier, in the house on Grosvenor Square, it had seemed so sensible to formulate a plan. To map out their movements in a logical way so that their actions would have predictable outcomes. But now, buried in this tunnel of horrors, it seemed impossible that any plan could bend this grimness to their own design.
Malarkey turned the light on Riley’s face. “You’ve caught yerself a dose of the morbs. Feels like the tunnel is closing in, don’t it? Feels like nothing is going to work out?”
Riley nodded. He didn’t want to look a total weeping willow before his king, so it was better to nod than speak.
“Yep, the morbs,” said Otto. “Barnabus used to get ’em something awful down here. Big fellow like him afraid of a few rats. He said it weren’t the darkness what did him in, it was the no light.” Malarkey shrugged. “Never understood that myself.”
Riley remembered something that he considered urgent enough for immediate speech. “Your Highness, you said it weren’t the rats I had to fret about in the stinkpipe. What, then? What should I fret about?”
“Why, everything, Ramlet,” cried the king jovially. “Every-blooming-thing conspires against a man in this unnatural excavation. The sludge beneath your boots is teeming with cholera. The bricks have got edges what will flay you quicker than a meat-man’s hatchet, and if you don’t bleed to death, then a speck of diseased mortar in the bloodstream will see you bottle-green by day’s end. There are invisible devils in the tunnels, too. If we happens across a cloud of chokey gas, then king and subject will be for the big sleep together. And of course there’s the pump house.”
Riley felt so sick with fear at this point that he decided he might as well hear about the pump house. “The pump house?”
“Well, say Her Majesty’s engineers sign off on a flush while we are sub-terra. There won’t be no warning, as we ain’t supposed to be down here.”
“But that’s the whole point of our plan, ain’t it, Your Majesty? We passed chink to the pump-house Johnny? No flush till you say so.”
“We passed chink to one of the pump-house Johnnies,” said Malarkey. “But I find that any plan which involves a combination of public servants, timing, and machinery has a top-notch chance of spectacular failure.”
Riley reckoned that if he hadn’t had a case of the morbs previously, then he definitely had one now.
On they walked, squelching and splashing, hearing their own footsteps echo down the tunnel as though ghosts walked ahead of them. The sewer floor was mostly curved at a uniform sweep, except where it buckled like a giant serpent or split to allow nature through in the form of earth humps or tree roots. Malarkey’s lamp splashed pale light on the bricks so that they seemed yellow and ocher, and not the burnt orange that they probably were. Some stretches seemed more ill-used than others, with collapsed walls and brick-melt left in the aftermath of a great acidic deluge from the evening “rush hour” or a good post-Christmas flushing.
“Oh,” said Malarkey brightly. “I clean forgot to mention the creepy-crawlies what seem to flourish in this sepulchral stinkhole.”
Riley felt the morbs settle on his brow. “Please, Your Majesty. I got enough on my plate.”
“Well, you won’t want nuffink on your plate when you gets an earhole full of these nasties.”
Riley did not object further, as it was obvious the particulars of these creatures were coming his way.
“Of course you’ve got your regular insectoids, only magnified by a nourishing diet of dung, which is like caviar and champagne to cock-a-roaches and beetles. I seen a beetle down here one time take on a rat, and the rat would’ve bested a dog.”
This was so ridiculous that Riley relaxed a little.
“That’s awful,” said Riley, but he must have somehow, in a slump of his shoulders perhaps, revealed a slight lessening in anxiety, which spurred His Majesty to descr
ibe greater horrors.
“And you may perhaps notice a glow betimes in a dark corner.”
“Please, King Otto, tell me not.”
“Scorpions,” continued Malarkey, relishing the word. “Luminous scorpions. They got acid in their sting. Melt a man down in a minute or three. I seen a cow once done in by sewer scorpions. Nothing left but horns and a tail.”
Riley swallowed. Surely that was the worst of it. Surely.
“But the absolute worst is the…” Malarkey said sotto voce, “…crigs.”
“Crigs!” exclaimed Riley, earning himself a cuff around the ear from his regent.
“Never say it aloud….Crigs…is like the devil. Speaking their name aloud summons ’em.”
Riley mouthed the cursed creatures’ moniker, followed by: “What are they?”
Malarkey took great delight in telling him. “They is a godless creature, half crab, half pig.”
Ten feet up, Riley would have slapped his knee and scoffed. Crab-pigs? That ain’t even bordering on possible.
But down here.
In a tunnel.
Riley had seen strange things in a tunnel, things that would make these crigs seem like the very epitome of everyday.
There was an important question that needed asking. “These…creatures. Are they pig size or crab size?”
“Pony-sized,” said Malarkey. “At the very least.”
Malarkey navigated the turns with confidence, and as they neared Regent’s Canal, the flow rose to Riley’s knees, and he had to pick his steps carefully to avoid a dunking. Malarkey caught him by the collar once when a brick shifted under his weight.
“Whoops there, Ramlet,” he said. “This is one place where a small drop leads to the big drop, so to speak. If you do happen to submerge, shut yer gob and snort air out yer nose till you finds yer feet, to keep the cholera at bay.”
“Is that an effective preventative?” Riley asked.
“Dunno rightly,” admitted Otto. “Sounds logical, dunnit?” He glanced sharply at Riley. “I ain’t a doctor, you know. Here I is, saving your life and whatnot, and all I get for me troubles is sauce. Quit with yer questions, boy, and keep yer mind on yer feet.” Malarkey kicked one foot out in front of him, raising a scythe of water in the pool of light. “Now, look—you made me forget me grammars. Listen to me, spouting yer in the stead of your. That was three yers in a single breath. Figary would have a fit.”
“So he would,” said Riley, daring to insert a joke at this juncture. It was a risk that paid off, and the two of them shared a chuckle as far as the next junction, which brought them to a wide stone abutment, built not from brick but a pale molded stone, reinforced with steel rods.
“I would feel reasonably confident that we have arrived at our destination,” said Malarkey, as he rapped the dam. “Reinforced concrete supporting the arch. Sets underwater, you know. Ingenious. For most coves it would be a shame to destroy something like this, but luckily for us I have always taken a perverse pleasure in tearing down structures what have been meticulously erected by others. Some call it a character failing, I call it a leadership quality, for what were Alexander the Great or Richard the Lionheart but mighty destroyers?” He held out a hand toward Riley. “Chisel and mallet, if you please. I shall take the first crack at this barricade.”
Riley found the chisel in his satchel, beside the detonators, which were sealed in waxed paper.
“Your High Rammity,” he said, passing them over with some ceremony, which pleased Malarkey.
Malarkey smiled, stretching his door-knocker beard and mustache. “Thank you, loyal subject. Very soon the throne will be mine once more.” His gaze drifted for a moment, doubtless thinking about the very same fleece-draped throne, then he was back to business. He set the lantern down on a half-crumbled plinth, dislodging a curious rat, then instructed Riley to set out their stock of candles.
“Not in a pentagram, mind,” he warned. “We got enough odds against us as things stand.”
Riley found nooks for his candles, careful not to graze his skin on the sweating bricks, and while he cupped matchsticks against the tunnel draft, Malarkey plied the concrete wall with his chisel, which he had covered with a cloth both to avoid sparks and keep the noise down as much as possible.
“Barnabus!” he grunted as he worked. “Barnabus.”
It struck Riley that Malarkey had volunteered for first crack. That implied that second crack would be his.
And there ain’t no magic trick I can employ to pulverize concrete that I have not had the opportunity to tamper with.
“A light, a light!” shouted Malarkey. “My kingdom for a light. Shine it here, Ramlet.”
Riley grabbed the lantern and elevated it to the limit of his reach. Already Malarkey had cleared a potato-sized hole.
“This wall ain’t so very tough,” he said. “In fact, it’s rotted to putty in some spots. Milady Sewer can have that effect on even the stoniest heart. Methinks this entire construction would bust into clay on its lonesome in a few flushes’ time.”
“Wonderful!” cried Riley. “A couple of jiffies and you will be clean through, and we can climb us a nice ladder back to the sun.”
“Barnabus!” said Malarkey in a strange grunt-speak combination.
But not as strange a combination as the accursed crigs, thought Riley, keeping his eyes peeled for creatures that he would swear to not believing in.
Malarkey made such good progress with his assault on the concrete, and so intent was he on the job, that he did indeed break through the wall in a jiffy or two. Ten at the most.
Otto threw the mallet and chisel from him. “What say thee now, Master Wall? Come between Malarkey and his vengeance, shall thee?”
That is quite the bundle of thees, thought Riley. Would Missus Figary’s son approve of this verbal jaunt into the past? And following this, he thought: Those tools may rest where they lie, for never will my hand scrabble around on this fetid riverbed.
Malarkey rested palms on knees for a moment, then spat.
“Your turn, lad.”
Though he was the junior, Riley was entrusted with the explosives work. After all he was a magician, trained by the West End’s best, well-versed in the handling and manipulation of potions and volatiles, powder bombs, flash bangs, and other such delicates. What Chevie had given him from Farley’s bag was ahead of its time viz its effectiveness, but the principles were the same. She had gone through the contents with them earlier that day.
Plug the hole with the plastic, screw in a detonator, and then get far away. When the time comes we will set her off by radio.
A radio bomb, thought Riley. That probably ain’t what Mr. Marconi had in mind when he created all that fuss a while back with his radio Morse code.
Riley put down the lamp and reached into his bag for the small block of plastic explosive.
More powerful than a barrel of dynamite and safer to tote around than nitroglycerin.
He rolled the plastique between his palms until he had a sausage of destruction roughly the same size as the hole in the wall.
The Sausage of Destruction. A good name for a penny dreadful.
Riley’s eye was good, and the sausage fit neatly into Malarkey’s groove, blending in perfectly with the concrete. With a jot of fortune, it would not be noticed on the other side.
“Presto!” he said, but Malarkey was not impressed.
“It don’t look like no great caboodle,” he sniffed. “A single cigar for all that wall? Don’t seem possible.”
“You saw what old man Farley did with a future gun,” argued Riley.
“Hmmm,” hmmmed Malarkey. “I seen something, right enough, but I ain’t swallowing that future twaddle without a good chew.”
“The proof is in the sausage, King Otto,” said Riley, pleased with his little joke.
Otto liked
that one too, and his laughter echoed down the tunnel, fading as it turned the corner. But another noise was riding the tunnel, a series of regular splashings.
Footsteps.
“Crigs!” shouted Riley.
“Or sewer cannibals,” said Malarkey.
“Sewer cannibals!” hissed Riley. “You never mentioned those previous.”
“I reckoned you had enough on yer plate with the crigs.”
They stood still as statues, both hoping the splashes would take another turning and pass them by, but the exact opposite occurred. The splashes grew louder and more numerous.
“Six troops,” judged Malarkey. “And they knows where they is going.”
Again, thought Riley. How do they find us? Does the colonel have powers like they say?
“Well,” said Otto, “we ain’t gonna just illuminate ourselves all polite. Candles, boy.”
Candles. Of course. Riley stepped as quietly as he could through the murky water, tipping each candle from its perch. They landed in the sewage with a plop and hiss. Malarkey closed the shutters on the lantern.
“Now, boy, hold on to my belt and wade, I tell you. Do not lift those feet unless we are eyeballed.”
Riley did as he was told, wrapping his fingers around Otto’s belt and following his regent, both dredging their boots through the mud, feeling the slow slush of sewage around their ankles, and the soft knock of semisolids against their shins. And even though their lives were in danger, he found a small space in his mind to be disgusted.
I will never smell right again, he thought.
He must have shivered, for Malarkey whispered back to him.
“You is probably fretting over your hair. Don’t be. The fetid air is surprisingly nourishing for a cove’s locks.”
“Excellent news,” Riley whispered back. “I am much comforted.”
Riley felt Malarkey tense, and reckoned his sarcasm had been detected.
“I will box your ears later,” said King Otto.
Riley almost looked forward to it, for getting his ears boxed would mean surviving their sewer jaunt, which at the moment was far from a sure bet.