The Claws of Evil

by Andrew Beasley

  A boy with red hair.

  Carter was dragging on his coat even as he left his rooms. He had been wrong the first time. He’d thought that flattery was the bait to snare Ben Kingdom, but the boy had wriggled off that hook. It was time to try a different sort of lure.

  Ben had been watching the baked potato man for about five minutes, planning his move. It would have been easier to buy one, but all he had in his pockets was a farthing and that wouldn’t stretch. He had the silver Coin too, but that wasn’t for wasting on luxuries like food. So while he savoured the taste of butter and pepper on the air, and tried to ignore the salt and stink of the Thames, Ben waited for his chance.

  The vendor was an old sailor, with grizzled whiskers and a wooden leg. Ben could see that the man was standing so close to his brazier full of burning coals that his false leg was beginning to smoke slightly. If it caught on fire that would be a good diversion, he thought, although he probably didn’t want to hang around that long.

  There was a fair crowd around the potato seller and Ben edged his way in, being careful not to make any sudden moves or do anything that might catch the man’s eye. Softly softly, catchy monkey, Ben thought to himself, drawing his hand up inside his sleeve so that he wouldn’t burn his fingers when he went for the grab. Just a little closer...

  He was inches away when a hand clasped his wrist fast and a voice whispered sharply in his ear. “Hold it right there, sunshine.”

  That’s it, Ben thought, the game’s up.

  Then he took a closer look at the hand. The green-gloved hand.

  “That was the most amateur approach at a swipe I’ve seen in a long time,” the girl said.

  “Ruby Johnson!” exclaimed Ben, surprised at how pleased he was to see her, considering that she’d left him in the lurch last time.

  “The very same,” she said, her eyes all wide and innocent. “I’m like a bad penny, aren’t I? I just keep turning up.”

  In all his life, Ben had never met a girl quite like Ruby Johnson.

  She was wearing velvet trousers for one thing, which was quite shocking for a girl, even if she undeniably suited them. She was different to the girls on Old Gravel Lane, who were mainly rough as rats, in Ben’s opinion. No, Ruby had class. She was different to the girls in Mr. Cowper’s ragged school too. They were quiet and serious, speaking only when spoken to and scribbling studiously on their slates rather than meeting his eye. Ruby Johnson’s eyes, by contrast, were almost inescapable. They were always on him, sometimes with such blazing intensity that he didn’t know how to cope and had to snatch his gaze away before he got burned.

  Ruby’s eyes were simply dazzling, Ben thought; the sort of jewels that men might fight for.

  For the remainder of the day, Ruby led Ben through the city and he looked on with a smile as she cast her spell everywhere they went. At the Jackdaw Inn, one flash of those emerald eyes gained them the best seats in the house and a steak and ale pie apiece, all courtesy of the florid landlord and absolutely gratis. In a quiet corner of Soho, a German Jewish tailor provided Ben with the first new jacket he had ever owned, and instead of taking money, the man had kissed Ruby’s gloved hand and thanked her for coming.

  “I can’t have you dressed as a ragamuffin if you’re going to be seen with me,” she said with a laugh. Ben laughed too, and without him really noticing, the hours slipped by. Somehow, when he was with Ruby, all his troubles seemed far away.

  A church bell chiming ten reminded Ben how late the hour, how cold the night, and how very homeless he was. “Ruby,” he said, “I’m grateful for everything that you’ve done for me so far...”

  “It’s nothing,” she said, her teeth glinting white in the moon’s glow.

  “...but I was wondering what the plan was. Have you got a billet somewhere where we can get our heads down or should we make our way to the river, try to find some shelter under a bridge?”

  Ruby tossed back her head and laughed. It was a beautiful sound but it still managed to annoy him. He wasn’t some child to be led around by the hand for her amusement.

  “If you’re going to make fun of me then—”

  She silenced him with one touch of her gloved finger to his lips. “Hush now, Benjamin Kingdom, I’m laughing because the night has only just begun.”

  And with that, she padded away down the lane. In the near distance, a drunken fight had broken out and the sounds of violence were getting closer.

  “Well, are you coming or not?” said Ruby.

  Ben stood his ground, hands shoved deep into his pockets. “Not until you tell me where we’re going.”

  “You’re not afraid of ghosts, are you, Ben?” she asked with a smile.

  The gate was locked and chained. On the other side of the wall, weeds and brambles had run riot, and as Ben looked through the bars, he could see statues of lonely angels, still crying silently over loved ones lost. All in all, I would much rather sleep under a bridge, he thought.

  “Give me a bunk-up then,” said Ruby cheerfully. Ben made a stirrup of his hands and hoisted Ruby onto the top of the crumbling wall. Then he scrambled up after her. She had taken him to a cemetery just off the Tottenham Court Road.

  “Whitefield’s burial ground,” said Ruby, still grinning. “Over twenty thousand bodies were buried here before they discovered that it wasn’t consecrated ground. It was quite a scandal at the time,” she added, hopping down among the graves.

  If it weren’t for her smile, Ben would have left her there and then. As it was, he lowered himself down off the wall and followed her through the garden of the dead. The snow was crisp and unbroken, a heavy blanket for all those sleeping beneath the soil. Ben trod carefully.

  “What are we doing here?” he asked, annoyance telling in his voice.

  Ruby didn’t answer, but instead brought him to a crumbling vault. Ben looked at the knotted ivy around the door, and the carved skull smiling back at him with a rictus grin. Ruby discovered another carving beneath the twisted vines, a gauntlet clenched into a fist. For reasons that she wasn’t sharing with Ben, it made her smile. Satisfied that she had found what she was looking for, Ruby put her shoulder to the door and it gave an inch. “In we go,” she said lightly.

  “You have got to be kidding,” said Ben. “I can find us somewhere much better than this.” Almost anywhere, he added privately.

  “Trust me,” she said and pushed the door open wide enough to slip inside.

  Ben followed with a sigh. It was even colder inside the tomb than it was in the graveyard. “This is stupid,” he said.

  Enough moonlight braved the gloom to catch Ruby’s green eyes. “Just trust me,” she repeated, and then, getting down on her knees, she began to smooth her hands over the flagstones. Her searching fingers quickly uncovered a heavy circle of metal, which she grabbed with both hands.

  “When I say ‘lift’ we both lift, understand?” she said.

  Those emeralds gleamed in the starlight.

  “Lift!”

  Ben lifted.

  From beneath the flagstone, a wave of hot air rose to meet them, bringing with it the warm glow of candlelight. Ben looked over the edge and saw a carved flight of steps leading down.

  “Where are we going?” said Ben.

  “Into the Under,” said Ruby, with a smile.

  There were so many questions in Ben’s head all shouting for his attention.

  Ruby paused only to drag the flagstone back into place behind them, before leading him down the spiral staircase. He followed her down the steps and into an arched tunnel that stretched away in both directions. The vaulted roof was high enough for him to walk without having to stoop, although he could easily touch it if he reached up. There were cobwebs in the corners, but one glance at the foot-worn floor was enough to tell him that this passageway was far from abandoned. The other big clue
was the candles, which burned in sconces the length of the tunnel, creating just enough light to give strength to the shadows.

  “How did you know how to find this place?”

  She smiled. “It found me.”

  Ben’s jaw clenched involuntarily. For someone so beautiful, she really could be very annoying. “How did you know about the trapdoor?” he tried again.

  “You know how to get into your own house, don’t you?” she answered glibly.

  Ben gritted his teeth. Did she do it on purpose? he wondered. “Where are you taking me?”

  “You’ll see,” she said over her shoulder, although this time without the usual jaunty bounce in her step.

  Ben had little choice but to follow her deeper into the strange warren. Although he liked Ruby, he realized that he didn’t know very much about her. She was fun, certainly, but she was also a dangerous, unpredictable creature; he had best be on his guard.

  As they made their way deeper into the maze of tunnels, they passed arched doorways and openings, although there was no clue as to where they might lead. Sometimes Ben could make out voices, echoing and hollow, but the words escaped him and only served to add to his sense of disorientation. In the London he knew, the one above his head, Ben considered himself to be king of the streets. Here in the Under he was lost, and every step took him further from the surface and safety.

  “So how do you find your way down here?” Ben asked after a while. He sensed her warming to him again and wanted to test the waters.

  “Look up,” Ruby said, pointing to the vaulted ceiling. Ben followed her gaze and saw some writing in an alphabet he had never seen before. “That marking tells me that we are directly underneath Goodge Street.”

  Ruby took his hand again and bounced up to the next junction. “That way to the basement of Madame Tussaud’s, sir, and that way to the dungeons of the Bloody Tower,” she said in her best cockney accent.

  The enormity of this labyrinth was beginning to set in and Ben let out a low whistle. “Who made all these tunnels? It must have taken years.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” said Ruby. “The work started over three hundred years ago and it’s not finished yet.” She paused. “Have you heard of Sir Alasdair Valentine?” She saw his blank expression. “I’m not surprised, few people on the surface have.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “That depends on who you ask.” She shrugged. “Some people see him as a traitor, others as a hero. It all comes down to which side you’re on, I suppose.” She looked full into Ben’s eyes then, as if challenging him to say something.

  Ben wished that he had a sister; it might have given him some small chance to understand the way that Ruby thought. He chose to ignore the look and say nothing. It seemed to do the trick.

  Ruby continued. “Valentine was Spymaster General for King Henry VIII and an ordained priest...amongst other things.” Ben didn’t understand the implications of that comment either, but held his tongue. “When the old King was at the height of his madness,” Ruby explained, “riddled with disease, desperate for a wife who would give him a son, estranged from the Pope and at loggerheads with most of Europe, he became increasingly paranoid; suspicious of anyone and everyone. It was Valentine who came up with the idea of digging a network of tunnels, so that Henry could travel in secret or escape in the middle of the night if the need arose. Unfortunately for Valentine, he clashed with the King one too many times and ended up with his head on a spike for a ‘thank you’ and the promise of death for anyone who ever dared to mention his name,” Ruby said with some resentment. “But that was the start of the Under.”

  “And the work has never stopped?” Ben was amazed.

  Ruby answered with pride. “We can travel to almost any destination in London,” she said, “without once having to put our heads above the surface.”

  “And who is ‘we’?” Ben asked. “Who lives down here, out of the light?”

  “People like you and me, Benjamin. Unwanted kids. All the ones that society doesn’t know what to do with. The throwaways and the runaways. The abandoned. The broken. The lost. Some of us are hiding, some of us are trying to escape. Most of us are just trying to live.”

  “The Legion,” said Benjamin.

  “Yes, the Legion,” Ruby replied. “For we are many.”

  It occurred to Ruby that she had already said too much.

  It was important to remember why she had brought Kingdom here and it had nothing to do with charity. She wished that Ben could be more disagreeable or repellent in some way. As it was, she was starting to like him, and that would never do. She was part of the Legion, she reminded herself, she had made certain promises; emotion didn’t come into it.

  Ben looked at her, all puppy-dog eyes, waiting for her to throw another morsel for him to catch. Well, he would have to go hungry.

  He was asking more questions and jumping along at her side and she ignored him steadfastly, fixing her eyes straight ahead.

  “Nearly there now,” she said coldly.

  Ben really didn’t understand Ruby.

  One minute she was his best friend, all toothy grins and big eyes, the next she was treating him like a bad smell: pretending he wasn’t there and wishing he would go away. Are all girls like this? he wondered.

  Ben felt like that stupid pudding-faced innkeeper who gave away his pies in return for one of Ruby’s smiles. Was he just another monkey who danced for her delight whenever she clapped her hands?

  It really was a shame that she had such a wonderful smile.

  He continued by her side through the warren of tunnels and side tunnels. She had stopped answering his questions and he had stopped asking them. Instead he was trying to gain his bearings, although without the familiar landmarks and the London skyline to guide him, it wasn’t easy. Ruby obviously knew these subterranean streets as well as he knew Shoreditch, but for the minute he couldn’t even tell east from west, and until he learned how to read the orientation markers on the ceiling, there was no way that he could make it out of this rats’ nest on his own.

  And rats’ nest it was, regardless of Ruby’s assurances that the dwellers of the Under were just like him.

  The top corridors had been deserted, but as they went further into the heart of the maze, it was becoming as crowded as Mrs. McLennon’s had been. Body packed beside body, fighting for space and air. The atmosphere reminded him of Mrs. McLennon’s too: there were children crying, husbands and wives shouting, men with too much drink in them challenging the world. As much as he hated Ruby Johnson at that moment, he was glad that he wasn’t here alone.

  A dark-eyed man in a battered Navy uniform approached from the other end of the corridor. He made as if to let them pass and then deliberately clipped Ben with his shoulder, spinning him around. Ben said nothing and fixed his own gaze ahead and centre. Keep your head down, he told himself.

  As they walked, he tried to understand the sort of society that had been created here, away from the eyes of the sun. As far as he could make out, although there were definitely locked doors which hid secrets of their own and some areas that appeared to be reserved for the higher levels of this community, most of the living quarters themselves were communal. They took the form of caverns carved from the living rock, with arched ceilings and fire pits for cooking and warmth. There were chairs and other pieces of furniture that had been manhandled down from the surface, even some scraps of carpet here and there, mismatched and ragged, like the inhabitants.

  Coffin-sized niches had been cut into the walls, hung with makeshift curtains to allow the dwellers some degree of modesty. He had expected the air to be rank with so many people living on top of one another, but though there was a rich haze of coal smoke, tobacco, cooking smells and the musk of hot bodies, it was not totally unpleasant and certainly no worse than Old Gravel Lane on a summer’s day.r />
  All around him, Ben saw the denizens of the Under stretching, yawning, scratching, talking, taking their supper, sipping hot tea, laughing, smoking a pipe before settling down for bed; all just as they might have done in the world above.

  As he began to feel more confident, Ben let his eyes wander further. He noticed small circular openings in the ceilings, which he surmised must ultimately find their way to the surface as chimneys, venting away the combined smoke of fires, candles, torches and lanterns. There were also wells full of fresh clean water, which came bubbling up from deep within the London loam, and, here and there, impressive mechanical devices which resembled huge leather bellows. They were powered by waterwheels constantly turning in man-made watercourses, and he guessed these were the lungs of the Under, drawing down clean air and saving them all from suffocation.

  Just then, the ground beneath Ben’s feet began to shudder, and he was filled with a sudden vision of caving roofs and crushed bodies, including, most alarmingly, his own. It started with a vibration in the flagstones, and then grew until it filled the length of the passageway with a deafening roar; part animal, part machine. Ben’s own legs shook and he brought his arms up to cover his head. Thundering, rattling, hissing, the wave of sound engulfed him and he braced himself for the worst.

  Nothing happened.

  The noise diminished, the tremors ceased, and the danger merely slipped away. And the strangest thing about it, Ben thought, was that no one else had paid it a blind bit of notice.

  At his side, Ruby Johnson was trying, and failing, to disguise her smile. Ben brought his arms down, feeling somewhat self-conscious, and tried to make it look as if he’d simply been having a stretch. Ruby Johnson sniggered. The Underground! Ben twigged a second later.

  “It was a train, wasn’t it?” he asked quietly.

  Ruby nodded.

  “Did I look very stupid?”