by Mira Bartók
The wind howled through the pipes like a wild animal caught in a trap as Arthur made his way through a series of tunnels, following the flow of the slow current. After a while, his eyes adjusted to the dark, and he saw signs of life scuttling and creeping about the sides and top of the tunnels: small white crabs, frogs, slugs, rats, and bugs the size of mice.
The drainpipe Arthur was in narrowed at the exact time the flow of the water sped up, causing him to lose his foothold. He suddenly found himself carried along by the current, bobbing up and down in the dark-brown river of filth. It drew him along so fast, he feared he would drown. It tossed him this way and that, and his head kept going under. He gulped in the mucky water and choked, struggling to keep his head above the surface.
He cried out for help, but all he could hear was his own voice echoing back to him: “Help me! Help me! Please!”
At last the rushing muck spilled into a much larger pipe. The water level lowered, and the current slowed. At the end of the long rusty pipe was a dim red light. He found his feet and trudged toward it with all the strength he had left in him.
The light led to a vast tunnel lit with red grease lamps. Arthur entered the tunnel and was at long last out of the river of sewage. He was drenched to the bone, covered in stinking filth, and shivering with cold. But he wiped his face off as best he could and kept going.
The tunnel led from one gloomy passageway to another, past a series of confusing corridors and a vast network of pipes and caves, leading to a labyrinth of even more tunnels.
Arthur was terribly lost.
Something was dripping from above, making small pools of stagnant black water everywhere. He looked up at the subterranean sky of sweating black rock and saw stalactites dripping rivulets from sewers above. The walls dripped too, and the ground where he stood was damp and covered in sewage. It was as if the City below the City were weeping.
Just like the gargoyles, thought Arthur.
He wanted to curl up somewhere and cry too, but he had to keep going.
Arthur let his ear be his guide. He had never been so grateful for his gift than in that moment, for he heard voices in a corridor on his right and hurried toward the sound. As he made his way, he noticed big-eyed mice and rats sniffing and gobbling up strange fungi, clumps of algae, and scuttling bugs. He wondered what he was going to eat down there, at least until he could find a way out. If he could find a way out.
And if not, would he ever see Trinket again?
When Arthur entered the corridor, he saw an astounding sight: hundreds of groundlings were pouring in from all directions. He had never seen so many in his life. They were all shapes and sizes and ages. Some were so old, they could barely walk. There were many young ones too, their parents trying frantically to keep families all together.
Arthur was pushed and jostled in the crowd. As he walked, a fog set in, thick as soup and brown as umber, like some primeval force conjured from the center of the earth.
He followed the corridor to a vast, vaulted place that looked like it had once been an immense cathedral made of black stone. Some groundlings went to the left, others to the right. All of them were seeking a bridge to the other side. For before them was a wide, sluggish river, deep and black as night.
Arthur closed his eyes and cocked his ear in one direction, then another. But there was no sound that could offer him the best choice. He tried asking others which way to go, but no one knew, for they were all strangers to this place too. He decided to turn right, and after several more twists and turns, he found himself at the head of a wide, rusty bridge.
Arthur soon discovered that at the entrance to Gloomintown, no little man with a teacup-shaped head and a clockwork monkey collected tolls from groundlings desperate to get inside. Instead, there was a giant mole groundling.
The Mole stood at the entrance to the bridge in a gray overcoat and bowler hat splattered with stains from the sewage dripping from above. The large black creature sniffed the stagnant air, his whiskers quavering. He held a stick in his hand; at the end of it was a barbed wire loop, which Arthur guessed was for snatching groundlings that tried to sneak by without paying.
As others pushed past him, Arthur felt paralyzed. He looked behind at the vast labyrinth of pipes and dark passageways flooded with filthy water. He couldn’t go back; he could only move forward, so he waited in an unruly queue until it was his turn to go.
He approached the Mole cautiously. “H-hullo,” said Arthur. “P-please, sir. I’d like to cross the bridge.” He bowed. But the Mole was quite blind and didn’t notice.
“Turn out your pockets,” said the Mole. It was a soft, sinister voice and oddly mesmerizing. “I smell it, groundling. Turn out your pockets. Quickly!”
Arthur had only one coin left. The coin Quintus had given him. It was his ticket out, his payment for food and shelter in Gloomintown until he could find safe passage away from there without traveling through the City above.
And so he lied.
“I . . . I don’t have anything. Please. May I pass?”
“I smell something shiny,” said the Mole. Arthur gasped, fearing the worst — that the Mole would take his gold key. But the Mole sniffed the air and said, “Yes, yes . . . something shiny and silver.” The Mole stretched the word silver out slowly, as though tasting it on his tongue. “Yes, yes, silver.” He sniffed the air again. “Turn out your pockets!” His voice was angry now; his black furry hand tightened around the stick with the wire loop.
Arthur had no choice but to pull out the coin from his pocket and hand it over to the Mole, who snatched it up.
The Mole ran his snout over it, his whiskers quivering with excitement. “Yes, yes, lovely silver, this. Lovely, lovely. You may pass.”
Arthur heaved a sigh of relief and walked over the rusty iron bridge into Gloomintown.
A COLD RAIN pelted down upon the roof of Miss Carbunkle’s Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures. It was June, but the weather inside the Wall was as dismal as always. It was the middle of the night, and everyone was supposed to be in bed. But three of Arthur and Trinket’s old friends — Nigel, the dachshund groundling, and Nesbit and Snook, the rabbity twins — were huddled together in a corner of the younger groundlings’ dormitory in Kestrel Hall, committing the worst possible crime of all.
They were singing.
And gathered ’round them were little ones, listening with wonder.
“That’s called three-part harmony, that is,” whispered Nigel.
“Lovely!” murmured the twins. “Lovely,” murmured the others.
“Let’s try it again, shall we?” said Nigel. “With more feeling this time, but pianissimo. The walls have ears! Right, then. Take it from the top: a-one and a-two and a-three!”
Despite Miss Carbunkle’s New World Order — the implementation of increasingly more rules and Wire’s gang of thugs gleefully ready to reinforce them — the groundlings had begun to defy the headmistress in every way possible. For many of them, in particular the ones who had helped Trinket in her clandestine endeavors, had been stirred to rebellion. And they were now unstoppable.
When chalk disappeared from the headmistress’s storeroom, pictures began to appear everywhere. Funny pictures of a bald Miss Carbunkle trying to catch her wig and caricatures of Mr. Sneezeweed blowing his nose right off his face. There were other kinds of pictures too — Arthur and Trinket sailing over the Wall to freedom, and images from the world outside: flowers and trees and butterflies and anything and everything the groundlings could remember from the time before they arrived.
They even drew unicorns and fairies. They were inspired.
But inspiration can be a dangerous thing.
Once caught, the rebels were never seen again. The disappearances that had begun that winter had only increased. And just as more and more groundlings arrived at the Home each day, more and more began to disappear.
Thus, as Nigel, Nesbit, and Snook began their forbidden song, a tall rat groundling with black pebble ey
es and a bespectacled man with a runny nose, bandages around both wrists, and a cast on his foot came upon them.
The Rat, proudly wearing the yellow scarf the headmistress had given him, clamped his sharp-clawed hand over the mouth of Nigel, while Sneezeweed grabbed the twins’ collars. The ones who had been listening quickly scampered to their beds and trembled under the covers, fearful that they would be taken as well.
Nigel, Nesbit, and Snook’s crime was a Code Red S-3 infraction, meaning it was the worst possible crime (Code Red); specifically, singing (S); with three groundlings as the culprits (3).
Sneezeweed and Wire dragged the small criminals out into the hall and shoved them forward just a few feet to their left. They stopped in front of what they had always thought was a storage closet. At the end of every hall was the same closet door, and like most of the doors at the Home, it was always locked up tight.
The hall was empty as usual. Sneezeweed unlocked the door and shoved Nigel, Nesbit, and Snook inside the closet, then lit a small lamp. Wire followed Sneezeweed and the others.
It turned out it wasn’t just a closet.
“Lovely word, dungeon,” said Wire. “Much nicer than cellar or basement, don’t you think? More poetic, dungeon. Sits nicely on the tongue when one says it, I daresay.”
Apparently, every single hall — Kestrel, Hawk, Falcon, and Owl — had a secret entrance to the cellar, and the closet at the end of Kestrel Hall was one of them. Sneezeweed reached behind some cleaning supplies on a shelf at the back and pressed what looked like a stain on the wall. The wall sprang open like a door, and he and Wire shoved Nigel, Nesbit, and Snook down a dark, winding staircase, into the unknown.
Cockroaches and spiders darted over their feet as they descended into the bowels of the Home. When the prisoners reached the bottom, a horrifying sight awaited them: as far as the eye could see was a factory. It was much larger than the Widget Room in Falcon Hall, which was the largest room in the Home. This was a real factory, with dozens and dozens of beetle-eating electromagnetic Monsters. And there were other machines that Nigel, Nesbit, and Snook were certain did other ghastly things.
The three small groundlings grabbed on to one another’s paws and started to cry.
“Cut your slobbering!” said Sneezeweed. He dragged them into a dim, dank room next to the factory. All along the walls were small cells like animal cages. Inside were the older orphans who had disappeared over the past four months or so, the ones everyone called Grumblers. In other cells were groundlings who had broken rules, just as they had. And groundlings they had once thought adopted or sent to another place.
This was the other place.
Sneezeweed pushed the three of them into a cell and said, “Good riddance!” He blew his nose and said, “Work starts tomorrow, five a.m. sharp! And here you don’t get the nice porridge and pea soup you get upstairs. You get what we call ‘bow-wow broth.’”
Sneezeweed informed them that they would work every day and evening, but, out of the kindness of Miss Carbunkle’s heart, they were allowed Sunday nights off. “But you will remain in your cells when not at work,” he said with an emphatic sneeze.
“Oh, and by the way,” added Wire. “No need for a clock down here. Believe me, you’ll know what time it is.”
The two turned and left to report back to Miss Carbunkle.
At the top of the stairs, Sneezeweed turned to Wire and said under his breath, “This is just fine and dandy, me working with you. A Rat. A common, conniving, filthy, stinking sewer rat groundling. I don’t know what you’re playing at, Wire, but don’t expect me to believe that you’re in this for anything other than to serve yourself. You will mess up, and when you do, I, Mortimer Horatio Eloishus Sneezeweed, will personally lock you up down below, with the rest of your kind. And I shall gladly let your rodent brethren dine on your spleen.”
“Is that so?” said Wire, smiling coolly. “Well, you will see, over time — Snotweed — just how useful I can be to Her Missus, and how useless you truly are. Oh, and by the way, as for dining on spleens — I’ve been known to dine on one or two myself.”
That same night, far away in the City below the City, Arthur sat gloomily against a wall of sweating black rock, next to a shallow pool, and pondered his hopeless situation. He had had a brutish journey that night and had just spent his last coin to cross a bridge — and for what? He had no money, no food, no place to sleep, and there was no way he could get out of this subterranean hell without help. But he didn’t know a soul. Not only that, but he never even got to see where he was born on Tintagel Road. Then there was the Songcatcher. He’d never listen to it ever again. And Trinket seemed lost to him forever.
Arthur didn’t even have the energy to cry.
The water looked black in the dim light, but who could say? Everything looked dark to him. The eternal blanket of night in Gloomintown was even worse than the eternal gray of Miss Carbunkle’s Home. How was he ever going to get out of there?
He wasn’t alone, however. All along the wall were hundreds of groundlings, huddled together, hungry and spent. They too had no idea what to do or where to go.
The answer came soon enough in the form of a truculent badger groundling with exceptionally large forearms, great yellowish claws, and a low, gravelly voice.
“Wake up, wake up, my pretties! Who wants a job? A fine bed for the night? Food for the belly? We all wants that, don’t we? Queue up, queue up, groundlinks. An’ those who don’t likes to work, well then, take a look to your right.” Everyone turned to see what the Badger was pointing at: a dark and dilapidated graveyard a short walk away. “Not a nice way to go, starvin’ to death, heh, heh, heh.”
Arthur joined the other wet and weary groundlings and got in line. He was bewildered by the fact that here, in the City below the City, groundlings, rather than humans, seemed to be in charge, at least so far.
The Badger opened up a giant red ledger and removed a quill pen from his pocket. “My name is Gaffer. But guess what? You lot gots no name down here! Heh, heh, heh! Instead, you gets a number! No need for names down here, no, not a-tall.” He cackled again, the same heh, heh, heh, a sound that Arthur found quite unpleasant to his ear.
When it was Arthur’s turn, the Badger looked him up and down. His eyes fixed on Arthur’s once red fluffy ear — now matted down with brown muck — and said, “Whot, you deaf an’ dumb, groundlink? Can. You. Hear. Me? Heh, heh, heh!”
Arthur decided that maybe this time it was in his best interest not to hide his secret gift. He reckoned that if this nasty creature thought he was deaf, he might give him the worst job ever, and Arthur needed to earn something in order to get out of there.
“Actually, sir, with all due respect, I can hear quite well. B-better than well, in fact — I can hear things very, very far off.”
“Well, in that case, Foxy, I gots a job for you! Starts tomorrow morning. You’ll be what we here call a Trap-Rat.”
“W-what’s a Trap-Rat?” asked Arthur.
“Heh, you’ll find out soon enough,” said the Badger.
“Will I make enough to get back to Lumentown?”
“You won’t be goin’ nowhere, Foxy. No one goes back. No one. An’ by the way, down here you gets a new name: one million, three hunnerd thirteen, hunnerd thirty-one, three hunnerd thirteen. That would be, for a dimwit such as yourself, thirteen — thirteen — thirteen — thirteen — thirteen. Got that? Oh, an’ one more thing. Lose a day of work, lose a day of bread. Now, wait over there with the rest of ’em until I say so.”
After what seemed like hours, Gaffer finally led Arthur and the others to what he called their “new digs.”
“Here they are, only the best for you lot!”
Arthur looked around but couldn’t see anything except a big black wall. “Ex . . . excuse me, but where are we supposed to sleep?”
Gaffer grinned. “Oh, it’s just a little hole in the wall, but it’s cozy, heh, heh.” He cocked his head toward it and laughed.
Arthur’
s new home was indeed a little hole in the wall.
Along the sheer black expanse, dripping with sewage from above, were rows and rows of holes carved into the rock from top to bottom. A complicated system of ropes, gears, platforms, and pulleys allowed the groundlings to ascend and descend the wall.
“Crookeries, we calls ’em,” said Gaffer. “Night crows, thems made ’em long times ago for their babies. Let’s hope they ain’t comin’ back to snatch you in the middle of the night! Heh, heh, likes to eat groundlinks, them birds! Thinks you lot is tasty!”
Gaffer handed each groundling a crust of bread and assigned them all crookery holes corresponding to their numbers.
“I reckon you lot wants a nice little blankie. Who wants a nice little blankie? Don’t be shy,” said the Badger.
They all raised their hands and paws eagerly, as it was quite cold and damp in Gloomintown.
“Well, bless my soul,” said Gaffer. “I ain’t got none!”
The crowd was silent. What else could possibly go wrong on this terrible night?
Arthur stared up at the vast wall and shook his head in dismay. Compared to this, the Home’s stone Wall was nothing. “If you p-please, sir,” he said, “how can I tell which one is mine?”
“Up at the top, Foxy. Next to the Wombat. Second crook to the left. The one with the five thirteens.” He cackled with his mouth wide open; Arthur cringed at the Badger’s teeth, which were rotten, cracked, and brown. Before he turned to go, Gaffer jerked his head up toward Arthur’s new “home” and said, “Mind the step! Heh, heh, heh!”
Arthur climbed up the rope ladder to a rickety platform and was hoisted to the top by a loud clanking pulley. His new “home” was a small, damp, empty hole carved into the rock. It reeked of bird droppings, mold, sewage, and pee. He crawled inside and tried unsuccessfully to fall asleep. He was to start work at five in the morning, which was in two hours’ time. Arthur was to work fifteen-hour days, six days a week, from five a.m. till eight at night, and half a day on Sunday, in exchange for a crookery hole and two crusts of bread a day.