They can see me. They’re everywhere around me, close to the floor. The voices have grown harsher, more like a chorus of croaking. There’s no point in trying to be surreptitious, and I shove my hand into my breast pocket. Grabbing the mobile feels like clutching at a last symbol of the world I took for granted. The prospect of seeing by the glow of the display screen becomes even less attractive as my action is hailed by another chorus. It’s no longer in unison, and it doesn’t seem to be entirely inarticulate. “Rip,” the voices are croaking. “Rip.”
I can’t help recoiling, though I’m afraid I’ll tread on members of the chorus. This doesn’t happen, and for some moments I can’t tell what has. I’ve managed to stumble to a halt, but that’s because my feet are sinking into the medium I took to be the floor of the cavern. I didn’t immediately recognise the process because the substance is too much like my own.
I struggle to drag myself free, both of the soft fleshy substance and of the insidious notion. My efforts only sink me deeper, and the voices rise to welcome me. Their utterances are growing more varied. “Brick,” I seem to hear in the midst of the disorganised clamour, and perhaps also “Deryck” and “Strong.”
I can’t think of using the light now. I abandon the mobile in my pocket and fling out my hands as the eager medium closes over my waist. It feels like a mouth, but it has several. More than one gapes under my hands as I try to shove myself upwards. I’m desperate to finish touching the substance around me. It contains entire faces, though they’re uncertain of their shapes and of how to keep separate and even of where their eyes and mouths are meant to be located. Do they feel extruded or half digested and recomposed? That and the sensation of frantic swarming are too much to bear, and I snatch my hands away, only to sink up to my armpits. Unstable faces mouth mine or croak in my ears. They and their kind seem to have just one message now—the first syllable of my name.
Perhaps they aren’t a multitude. Perhaps there’s just a solitary entity, since many limbs are working in unison, extending their fingers to capture my arms and pull me down. Certainly the chorus has become synchronised again, and the cavern echoes with the chanted syllable as the fleshy medium engulfs my face. My mind and my innards seem to clench on the thought of suffocation, and I feel close to losing my awareness of this burial in a substance that isn’t quite flesh or mud. My mind stops short of closing down, because I’m still able to breathe. Perhaps whatever has caught me is breathing for me, which may be worst of all.
Chapter Forty-eight
TOWARDS THE LIGHT
I’m lying on stone in the dark. I feel both reborn and released from a dream too vast for one of mine. Perhaps I was engulfed by a horde of dreams, unless that was the dreamer, if there’s any difference. Perhaps the swarming mass was composed of a spawn of dreams that couldn’t hatch—dreams too inchoate to reach the surface or survive there, instead staying mired in the dark. However substantial they were, they seemed too unsure of their nature to be more than first drafts or experiments. Perhaps that’s why they were so desperately loquacious, overwhelming me with their clamour—words almost too short to be called words, fragments of language that the city must once have understood, utterances too ancient to have retained their meaning, unless they have yet to come into use. There were whole thoughts too, solitary or pieced together by several voices, but I want to have left them behind, along with the cavern and its contents. Above all I believe I would prefer not to dwell on whatever process has left me where I am. Recapturing my sense of myself will be enough.
I feel not much more solid than water. I’m afraid of finding out that I no longer have much use of my limbs. I raise my head on its not entirely stable neck and peer into the dark. It seems unwilling to reveal any perspective, let alone the faintest glimpse of my surroundings, but I can tell that I’m attempting to see downwards. My feet are lower than the rest of me. I’m lying faceup on a slope.
The darkness into which I’m peering feels like silence rendered visible. If it’s holding its breath, what is it waiting for this time? I scramble away from it on my back. My limbs are rediscovering their strength, and I flounder off my back and start to crawl. Before long I’m able to rise onto all fours, and soon I risk wavering to my feet. Some instinct has kept me clear of any nearby walls, but how far can I safely go without seeing where I am?
As I grope in my pocket I’m afraid the mobile will have been mislaid when I was cast up on the stony shore. My fingers close on it, however. I fumble it out and poke at the keypad, to no visible effect. Was the battery damaged or drained of power in the midst of my struggles? I’m about to jab the keys more fiercely when they and the miniature screen light up.
I can’t help hoping for some sign of a message, but there’s none. Of course there’s no signal down here. I turn the mobile away from me and do my best to blink the dazzle out of my eyes. In a few moments I manage to distinguish that I’m in a wide natural passage. It slopes steadily upwards, and the floor is slightly concave. So long as I follow the bottom of the curve I’ll be sure of walking straight, even in the dark.
I haven’t seen or heard what I most want to—my parents and Lucinda. I mustn’t let the silence at my back deter me from looking for them. Suppose they’re all nearby and somehow unable to make a sound or afraid to betray their whereabouts? Could following the ledge have misled them back into the cavern? The thought is enough to make me turn the way I must have come.
The glow of the mobile glides over the right-hand wall and emerges dimly from the passage. Beyond the rounded entrance I can see little except a great deal of darkness. I’m not certain if I glimpse a movement like a vast wave withdrawing sluggishly from the light—still less that the wave is composed of restless heads and limbs or parts of both. Any movement subsides out of reach of the light, and I’m preparing to venture closer in case I may have left my parents or Lucinda behind when I hear a sound.
It’s somewhere up the passage. It’s a distant song. For some reason I think of a fragment of the song about loving Jack—“The jolly days are done, and the last goodbyes are whispered”—but before it ends I recognise “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” There were more than two voices, however indistinct, and I’m so dizzy with relief that I feel in danger of losing my balance as I turn to the upward slope. I let the phone show me the route again, and then I slip the mobile into my pocket. My confidence increases as I begin to stride up the incline, but I wish the song would renew its promise. In a while it does—at least, it starts again from the first line. Though it doesn’t sound closer, it’s growing louder. There are more voices, but I don’t recognise any of them.
They’re in the open. I’m hearing football fans in the upper world. It makes me feel utterly unlike them, excluded by more than the song. If only I could hear a familiar voice! Wouldn’t at least my father join in if my parents were ahead? Must I go back, however far towards the surface I’ve progressed? The prospect feels like more than one kind of reversion, and I can’t help protesting aloud. “Where are you now? Why are you leaving me like this?”
“We’re here.”
It has to be the most welcome sound I’ve ever heard, yet it seems not much more likely than a dream. Lucinda and my parents spoke in chorus, adding to the sense of unreality. How did I manage to pass them in the dark? They must have made certain they weren’t noticed—of course, because they couldn’t know if I was Wrigley or Maddock. I take out my mobile and press a key, but as soon as the phone lights up my father says “Don’t do that.”
I can’t see how he could be talking to me, and I’m turning to face them when he says “I’m telling you, switch it off.”
“Why, what’s the problem?”
“It gets in our eyes. We don’t need it. We can find the way like you have.”
I mustn’t risk an argument that he might use as a reason to separate us again. I relocate the way ahead with the glow of the keypad before consigning the mobile to my pocket, where it glimmers like a luminous insect and then fades. I
’m not entirely unhappy to have relinquished it, since it dazzled me as well. Though I hadn’t time to distinguish my companions, hearing them behind me is enough. I wait until the scraps of lingering pallor have sunk into my eyes, and then I say “Everyone all right, then?”
“Never better,” says my father.
Lucinda and my mother murmur in agreement. There’s so much I want to ask, but it can wait for us to reach the open, where I’ll be able to see that my father doesn’t make another bid to disappear. Besides, I need to concentrate on the route, and I can best do that by putting out of my mind whatever happened in the cavern. I take a pace towards the distant song that echoes down the passage, but at once I’m afraid my father may slip away again in the dark. “Can you let me hear you?” I say. “Let me know you’re there.”
“Will this do you?” my father says and begins to sing. “When you walk…”
My mother joins in, and so does Lucinda by the end of the second line. “Don’t be afraid,” my mother exhorts and then stops singing, but only to say “You as well, Gavin.”
I pick up the song at the end of the fourth line. We aren’t singing along with the football crowd; we’re half a verse behind, and I feel as if we’re trying to compete or to resemble them and failing at both. Eventually we let the final line go, and as the echo of the last word makes its way into the dark I announce “I’ll start this time.”
I don’t until the football crowd recommences the song. Will that help us stay unnoticed? Surely there’s no need to, but it may be best if we don’t sound as if we’re mocking the crowd. Joining in with them feels like being potentially able to lose ourselves among them, but why should any of us do that? The last thing I want is to lose anyone again. Singing along with the crowd lets me feel a little closer to the surface, but I don’t dare to put the impression into words until another one grows more definite. Unless my eyes have adjusted so miraculously that I can see in the dark, there’s the faintest trace of light ahead.
I may have taken twice as many strides as there are lines in the song before I’m any surer. A faint pale glow is seeping around a bend in the passage. I grow dry-mouthed with restraining my hopes until I reach the bend. Beyond it the floor grows level, all the way to a heap of earth and rubble that blocks the passage.
I’m seeing this by the whitish glare that streams through a gap in the roof. Is it moonlight? No, it’s coming from a lamp in the street along which the football crowd is marching. “Wait,” I say, because I don’t want my party to make for the light only to discover there’s no way out. “Let me see.”
I feel as if I’m conducting a final tour, first ensuring that the route is safe. Where am I leading my party? Not to any resolution of the enigmas that have been troubling me, I’m sure. Maybrick and Williamson and the rest of them will live because they’re unexplained—because that’s how the city wants its legends to remain. As I approach the gap I have to reduce my eyes to mere slits to cope with the glare. I can see what I need to see. Chunks of sandstone offer a way to climb up the heap of earth, and the foot of a ladder is buried in the ground above the gap in the roof.
“Don’t come yet,” I call and glance back. Lucinda and my parents have turned the bend. The streetlight paints everything monochrome and blurs my revived vision, so that they’re just indefinite discoloured shapes. I couldn’t even count them at the moment, and I’m relieved when one of them says “Careful.”
That’s my mother, and Lucinda echoes her. “Watch out for yourself, Gav,” says my father.
“Just let me check,” I say and clamber up the incline. The rocks embedded in the earth stay firm beneath my weight. Above the jagged gap is sandstone at least two feet thick. I grasp a rung of the ladder and heave myself through. The ladder sinks into the ground, but not much. I take hold of the next rung, and the next, and then my head is in the open.
A swelling chorus of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” seems to greet my appearance. Ordinarily I would stay clear until the streets are clear of incorrigible revellers and broken glass, but not when I need to bring my parents and Lucinda to the surface. The crowd can’t see me, I gather once my slitted eyes begin to adjust to the direct glare, any more than I can see them. I’m in a hole like the grave of a giant. It’s alive with dark shapes—shadows of the crowd marching past the barrier around the roadworks. I’m several yards beneath the edge of the street, to which the ladder extends. I venture up two rungs, and then I’m able to see a street sign. It’s Richmond Street, which leads to Williamson Square. I’m beneath Frog’s Lane—beneath Whitechapel.
It seems more appropriate than I can grasp that my haphazard tour should end here. Perhaps at last the chattering of history will let me rest, though I feel pregnant with undefined dreams. More of the crowd tramps past, recommencing the song. It’s beginning to resemble a ritual—the march and the red banners some of the singers are waving. How surprised are they going to be at the sight of my companions and me? I haven’t time to imagine how they will react. Emerging from underground feels like a dream come true, and perhaps soon I’ll remember which one. “All right,” I call into the passage and wait until Lucinda and the others move into view. My eyes are still growing used to the unaccustomed light, so that I can scarcely distinguish the cluster of shapes in the passage. “Hop up,” I say hoarsely. “It’s safe.”
Acknowledgments
As ever, Jenny was the only other reader of the first draft, which is considerably unlike this one. John Reppion and Niki Flynn sent me along branches of the labyrinth I would otherwise not have explored, and in a talk at the World Horror Convention in Toronto, David Morrell gave me a solution to a problem of depiction. Sections of the book were written at Tammy’s and Sam’s house in Brockley, in Saratoga Springs (during the World Fantasy Convention), York (a British Fantasy Society open night), Manchester (the Festival of Fantastic Films), Nottingham (the British Fantasy Convention), and at the Mercure Napoli Angioino hotel in Naples and the Deep Blue Sea apartments in Georgioupolis, Crete. At about 7.30 on the morning of 11 August 2008, an unseasonable shower of rain in Georgioupolis set about corrupting the topmost page of the text. No frogs were spotted.
The helpful staff of the Local History Library (where I’m especially grateful to David Stoker for all his support) and of the Williamson Tunnels and Merseyside Constabulary have been replaced by characters quite unlike them for the purposes of the tale. The affidavit cited in chapter two is reprinted in Jack the Ripper: the 21st Century Investigation by Trevor Marriott (John Blake, 2005), and can also be found online.
Since I’ve had fun once again with inventing local restaurants, let me list a few real ones we recommend. In Liverpool our favourites include the Valparaiso (Chilean), the Maharajah (South Indian), the Sultan’s Palace and the Mayur (Indian), the Akshaya (Sri Lankan), the Yuet Ben (Beijing Chinese), the Mei Mei, Jumbo City and City Rendevous (Cantonese) and La Viña (Spanish). On the Wirral peninsula, we’re fond of the Sawasdee and the Siam (Thai), the Capitol (Chinese), the Kerala Kitchen (South Indian), the Saffron Delight and the Jalali (Indian), Lazaros (Greek) and the Mezze (Turkish). Bon appetit (and my curse on the spellchecker that insists I meant to type appetite)!
The lines from Europa 51 / Liverpool—London 85 are quoted from The Gates of Even (Ekstasis Editions, 2002) by permission of the author, John O. Thompson.
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