by Brian Lumley
“I was curious, and in a little while I was under the west tower, huddling on the high stone balcony where it projects out over the ocean. From there I could look up at the barred window of Sara’s cell two levels up. And I remembered how she had been when I’d taken her there, how I had to carry her, and how she’d mumbled in her weird delirium:
“‘He came to me out of a mist,’ she’d rambled to no one in particular. ‘And I ran to him, begging for his help. I hoped he wouldn’t notice my eyes—but then I noticed his! And when he held my head and looked at me, I felt him sucking at my mind, my thoughts! I still have some, but faint, so very faint. I can remember you, Delia, but all else is ghostly, fading, receding from me …
“Then, as I seated her on her cot, she looked at me oh-so-vacantly and asked, ‘What is this place? Where am I?’ And oh, I knew we were all possessed … !
“But there I was, on the high stone balcony. How long? Not long, I think, before I saw candles lit, and heard his unmistakable voice, that voice out of hell—the voice of Maralini. He was with her, but for what? And that voice: so deep, so low, so seductive. And then his snarl!
“‘What?’ he cried out, so that I heard him quite clearly. ‘You have ascended? You have a leech?’ And then his laugh. ‘But my pleasure with you is doubled and redoubled! I shall have you Sara, and then your creature both.’
“Then Sara’s screech—a bone-chilling sound—the cry of a madwoman, oh yes! Driven mad, by terror and torture. But Sara, she’d always been a strong one, so she had, and never more than that night.
“Whatever was left of her—of Sara herself, of the sweet sister that we’d known—it fought back, fought off Maralini’s advances. I heard her cot go crashing, saw shadows clash in the light from her candles, and heard again her shriek, which ended in such a rending, tearing sound that I fancied flesh was being torn. Sara’s flesh. And as it later turned out, I was right.
“But then—
“Whether she was thrown or threw herself, with all the passionate strength that a madwoman can muster, we may never know. But her window, bars and all, burst outwards. And with her tattered gown fluttering about her like the wings of a broken bird—which she was, poor thing, which she was-Sara came plunging out and down!
“Out beyond the high stone balcony she flew—such was the force of her headlong dive—and dwindling down the face of the cliffs, her ragged figure fell towards the night-dark sea. Sara, poor Sara, was gone. And I admit that I considered it a mercy.
“The next morning, before the sun was up, Vavara sent for me. She asked no questions about the previous night—said nothing about Sara getting out, and so forth—but told me to go and put Sara’s cell to rights. And then she said, ‘Let there be a lesson in what you find, Delia. The lesson is this: it is not wise to resist me, but it is very wise to resist Maralini. Remember, while you are by no means beautiful, still you have much to lose. Consider yourself fortunate, Delia, that you are older and your looks are fading. For the gap between beauty and ugliness need not be any wider than the cutting edge of a knife, as you have seen. And between homely and hideous? Ah, but you have not seen the best—or the worst—of my works! Now go!’
“And in the chaos of Sara’s cell, her strewn books, tapestries, blanket, and broken cot, I found her lower jaw, its flesh all torn, like a discarded piece of a slaughtered animal …”
Sister Anna sat shivering under the fig tree, and her sulphur eyes were wide in the gloom. “But now I’m more afraid than ever!” she said. “I thought I’d find strength in your strength, but instead I’ve found horror in your story. When our watch is over, I shall pray to God the whole day through.”
“He can’t help us, else He surely would,” Delia shook her head. “And it’s a blasphemy for such as us to even mention His name. No, He can’t help us—but we can help ourselves. There are sharp cleavers in the kitchen, and we can shape stakes out of pieces of good pine among the bolts of firewood.”
“It’s all too horrid!” cried Anna, starting to her feet.
But Delia was suddenly alert. Rising, she hissed a warning and caught the other’s elbow. “Quiet now, and keep to the shade. Look!” And her head tilted upwards.
Up there, seen through the moon-dappled leaves of the fig, the window of Vavara’s high tower was lit by a pair of flickering candles. Between them, a dark, silent silhouette gazed out on the night through scarlet pinprick eyes!
Then the head of the silhouette slowly inclined downwards, and it was as if Vavara’s fiery gaze saw right through the canopy of fig leaves and into Anna’s and Delia’s hearts—and perhaps into their minds. Huddled together, the sisters held tight to each other and looked away. They closed their eyes and held their breath … they even held their thoughts, as for a minute or two, perhaps three, they stood frozen in their terror.
But when next they dared to look up, Vavara was gone …
London is two cities—one seen and one unseen. The one that is and the other that used to be, now joined by darkness. The darkness that two thousand years of men have made with all of their building, their bridging or arching over, their tunnelling of watercourses and vaults and cellars and shelters, and their veritable labyrinths of transportation and communication networks. Thus underground London, while it is still a part of London, is world apart, one that has been set apart by men.
It is a subterranean city of sprawling sewers that used to be canyons, sweetwater streams and flourishing rivers, of low ways and no-go-ways that once were highways and byways, and uncompleted or abandoned human-life support systems that now support hordes of squealing rats, slithering eels, croaking frogs, utterly silent, etiolated fungi … and who knows what else?
And there are men down there, too. The flushers.
Ten million cisterns are flushed above, most of them many times a day, and far below the city’s upper pavements the flushers are paid to flush what was flushed. That’s their work; it’s what they do; they are the city’s troglodyte antibodies, scraping away at the metal, crumbling brick, and reinforced concrete walls within its serpentine veins, keeping its systems free and its juices running, unclogging the sclerosis of inner arteries, and dispersing their accumulated detritus. For if not, then the outer skin of the city would erupt in poisons, and the city itself die.
Such might be the poetic viewpoint, while from a flusher’s point of view it’s far simpler: he shovels shit.
Wallace Fovargue had been a flusher, would still be if his erstwhile ganger and colleagues would have him. But they wouldn’t, and neither would the Ministry of Sanitation or its subsidiary ICLC, the Inner City of London Council. For Wally Fovargue had been blacklisted and would never again work in the dark and dripping bowels of subterranean London.
He would never work there, no. But being who he was—the way he was, and having been a flusher all his life—Wally was always going to be there. For he had nowhere else to go … and anyway, the sewers and underground byways suited him to perfection. For one thing (and with the exception of other flushers), there were no people in them. But the flushers didn’t go where Wally went, and they certainly didn’t live there.
Wally had tried the surface world. He didn’t much like it; he loathed his weekly excursion up from the guts of the city to collect his unemployment benefit. For to the wannabe civil servants who paid it, he was just another scruffy bum. Or not just a bum, but a freak, too. A stumpy-legged, long-armed, hunchback freak. And occasionally, in the dingy, half-tiled corridor that looked like the entrance to a urinal, Wally would hear the whispers of the other downand-outers, where they waited in a queue to approach the pay-out windows in a stuffy, broom-closet-size room with reinforced one-way glass surrounds:
“That’s the freak,” those whispers would go. “Can you wonder why that specimen’s out of work? Jesus, like who’s going to employ some kind of fuck who looks like that?” And Wally had no doubt that the emotionless, cold-eyed cashiers counting out the money and paying him—without ever touching him—thought the sa
me thing. One of Mother Nature’s little errors, our Wally. But on the other hand they’d never argued with him, never tried pushing him into some job he didn’t want. Oh, yes—they, too, knew that he wasn’t going to find a job, also that they weren’t going to find one for him.
Only glance at them suddenly, catch them unawares, and the thought was right there, written in their cold eyes and pinched nostrils: Who in his right mind is ever going to employ a sick-looking fuck like this? The one good thing about it, they paid up and got him out of there just as quick as you like. He never had to explain why he hadn’t been out looking for a job, or how come he continued to be “of no fixed abode.”
The money wasn’t much, but that was okay; Wally could live on it, barely. That was the beauty of not having a mortgage to pay off, of not having a roof over your head. But in fact Wally had hundreds over his, an entire city of them. Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, Bond Street, Mayfair, the Bank of England, the Ritz, even Buckingham Palace! Some pretty high-class residences up there. And some high-class arses perching on the crappers that watered Wally’s underworld.
But Wally didn’t waste time while he was up there. He was obliged to go there, for the money, but once he’d been paid—shortly after nine o’clock on Thursday mornings, for he always tried to be first in the queue—then he would get off to the nearest supermarket with his list. Food came first, of course, then a six-pack of beers (he didn’t drink on Sundays), candles and batteries, one newspaper (he liked to keep up to date with current events), and his favourite magazines … girlie magazines, yes.
Wally dressed as best he could—which only served to add to the incongruity of his appearance. If he were tramplike, he would scarcely warrant a second glance. But reasonably attired, he was out of place and people looked at him as they would at a dressed-up orangutan. That was what he couldn’t bear about the overworld: the fact that people stared, frequently laughed, and then looked away in embarrassment.
He was—or might be, according to Darwin at least—the product of “natural” selection. Wally’s great-great-grandfather had been a flusher of sorts (or, as he would have been known in his time, a “tosher,” one of an early breed of sewer scavengers who earned their livings from whatever they could salvage), and likewise his great-grandfather, his grandfather, and his father immediately before him. So perhaps all those accumulated generations and years of stooping, shovelling, and scraping had altered his genes to suit. For in aspect he was a troglodyte.
Wally was forty-three and balding; a slipped halo of hair hung down like a curtain to cover his big ears and the back of his pockmarked neck, and was cut in a ragged fringe over bushy black eyebrows. His broad shoulders were powerfully muscled, as were his gangly arms and short, thick thighs. Reduced in height by his stumpy legs and S-bend spine, he was just three feet and nine inches tall, ideal for work in sewers that were often only three to four and a half feet in diameter.
Except he no longer worked there …
As to how that had come about, his dismissal: it had resulted from what the tribunal had been obliged to call an “accident,” for Wally had been the only witness. As to what had happened:
A flusher he had been working with had been sucked into a vertical sump where he had drowned in excrement. But since this was the second accident of its sort in nine months (another man had been crushed by a cave-in of rotten bricks), and since both of the deceased were known to be practical jokers who from time to time had preyed on the hunchback …
… The other flushers had flatly refused to work with him. For whether in malice or in passing, they’d all had their “fun” with Wally in their time, but no way were they about to let him have his with them! And the flusher gangs weren’t the only suspicious ones; there had been serious doubts in the minds of several officials sitting on the tribunal. But lacking evidence to the contrary Wally had got away with double murder. At least to the extent that he hadn’t as yet paid for his crimes, except in the coin of the rough companionship he’d shared with the flushers. Well fuck them!
Wally wasn’t a well man. He had twice suffered from spells of a mild form of hepatitis, and he suspected he might have contracted Weil’s disease from rat urine. Well-read on the hazards of his lifestyle, he knew that the disease finds a hold in cuts and scratches, and eventually attacks the brain. Certainly he’d found himself thinking some weird things recently—and not so recently, either.
It had started maybe three years back, when Wally had been a flusher proper. Then, as now, his hearing had been more acute than the rest of his “mates,” also his sense of smell, and he’d begun to hear and smell all sorts of unusual things in subterranean London. Sounds from regions where there shouldn’t have been anyone or -thing to make them, and whiffs that weren’t ammonia, or choke- or fire-damp, or the putrid stench of sulphurated hydrogen. Weird whiffs, really … like death and decomposition, and yet like life, too, though just what kind of life was anybody’s guess. But in any case the sounds and stenches had always come from places he couldn’t reach, the unknown, abandoned or forgotten nether levels of an older underworld entirely. Places that Wally’s coworkers weren’t authorized to visit, and where they would never wish to venture anyway.
Also, he had thought on occasion to see movements, shadows where there shouldn’t be any. Shadows weren’t a rarity; light a candle and he’d have shadows that moved with the flicker of the flame. But in torchlight, and especially when the torch was stationary—seated on a table, perhaps, for reading, or over his bed, as he settled to steep—then Wally’s shadows should stay sharp and really weren’t entitled to move at all. But sometimes … sometimes he thought they did.
And very strange shadows at that. Not small, scuttling rat shadows, but those of something much larger, even man-size, and swiftly flowing. Except of course, men don’t flow …
Such were Wally’s thoughts on the Thursday morning in question, as he carried his bag of provisions into a lane off Fleet Street, entered a walled back garden running to wilderness, and went down on all fours to vanish under a canopy of brambles and rank shrubbery. South flowed the Thames, and east lay the inner City of London itself. The River Fleet, a submerged watercourse that once ran on the surface, gurgled soundlessly, directly underfoot. And there, under a thin layer of dirt and parched leaves, Wally lifted the Victorian manhole cover that was only one of his many entranceways to the underworld.
Fastening his bag to his belt, Wally let himself down into darkness. His feet found the rungs and he descended, only pausing to pull the antique manhole cover back into place overhead. Then, squeezing himself tight to the wall to allow for his malformed back, he continued his descent.
Twenty feet or so vertical to the first level, then a veritable labyrinth of conduits and tunnels, and walkways like towpaths that marched alongside turbid rivers of slurry, seemingly endless low-ceilinged sewers, and echoing, mist-wreathed galleries of rusting, abandoned tracks … then further descents down shaky, flaking rungs that browned his palms with rust, and more galleries, waterways, sewers, and so on. Ninety minutes, in all, to get to the place that Wally called home. A very short distance as the crow flies—but crows were in short supply in Wallace Fovargue’s domain—and the way confused and wandering, literally labyrinthine.
If Wally had been a ganger, a boss, there were such places he could have shown his flushers, places they wouldn’t believe! But to get to them they’d need to be daring, brave, and imaginative beyond their mundane imaginations. For they had only ever seen this underworld as a workplace, while to Wally it was the entire world—his world. And in it, some sumptuous places.
Sump-tuous, yes! And Wally chuckled as he covered the last few yards of the last tunnel to his “residence.”
The tunnel was an uncompleted (in fact barely begun) railway line, where short, small-gauge ties were still visible, indicating the use of manual bogies in the removal of debris. The tracks, however, had been taken out, possibly to be melted down for war materials. During the Second
World War this place had been opened up for use as an air-raid shelter. The access shafts had later been filled in; but the sweating brick walls still boasted a few tattered recruitment posters that dated back to 1943 and ’44, while others continued to warn against fifth-columnists.
Wally read them as the history of a time he’d never known, but that his father had remembered vividly—until Weil’s disease had taken him. “The sirens would make an ‘ell of a noise,” his father had told him. “Then the Old Folks’d bundle us up, me and yer auntie” (she was in a “home” somewhere now) “and ’urry on darn the unnergrarnd. Well, that was like an ‘ome from ’ome ter me, wot wiv workin’ darn there and wotnot …”
And it was like going home to Wally, too. In fact the one and only home he had known for more than a year now, since his landlord gave him the boot for “frightening” the other tenants. Frightening them? Why, Wally had scarcely ever looked at them! Which had been enough, apparently.
But what the hell, there were no snivelling, tale-telling “tenants” down here. Just the rats and frogs, the eels and mosquitoes, and various small bat colonies. And no grubby landlord to pay, either. So as for the overworlders—fuck ’em all!
Wally climbed up onto what might have been intended for a platform if the underground line and station had ever seen completion. Now he was at the hub of a system of radiating tunnels, none of them going very far, one of which had still been fitted with indestructible army-style bunk beds when Wally first found the place. He’d kept one such bed intact, dismantling and stacking the others to make more room.
He had long since tapped into the nearest water main, had all the drinking and washing water he needed; the same with gas for cooking. No problem there. But he’d steered clear of electricity; it was available but he’d avoided it. He had this aversion to messing about with live wires, and anyway he’d heard a rumour that they could track unauthorized users. Also, his eyes were pretty well suited to weak light; a couple of candles or a dim, battery-powered torch beam was about all he needed. No TV, no, but he was equipped with a windup radio. Its aerial was a half-mile of wire whose other end was tied to a lightning conductor in the steeple of an old church near Moorgate. One hell of a job that had proved, but well worth it. The reception was quite marvellous.