by Clare Clark
When he stopped running he was underground. It did not occur to him to ask how he had come to be there or for how long. The tide was rising and he had no lantern but he was oblivious to the icy stream of shit that rushed around his legs, flooding his polished boots and dragging at the wool of his best trousers. He felt only the desperate, deafening need to cut. His right hand clenched in the darkness, every fibre of muscle in his fingers and palms screaming for the familiar weight of the knife. The cravings overran him, a monstrous, murderous army driving battalion after savage battalion into his skull and between his ribs to lay him waste and commandeer the very marrow of his bones. Every inch of his skin was alive with them, every tiny filament of hair blazing as though set alight. Their bayonets spiked every shallow breath he dragged into his throat as he slipped and stumbled down into the darkness, his frozen feet clumsy on the rotten bricks.
He was close now, he knew it, although he could see nothing. The cravings came faster and thicker, faster and thicker, peeling away the skin from his heart, filling his lungs until every breath was an agony and his chest quivered like a shell ready to explode. The darkness was so complete that he could not see his own hands. William closed his eyes, squeezing them shut. Abruptly the floor of the tunnel dropped away. He was almost there. Bent double, stiff and clumsy with cold, he scrabbled desperately with his fingers at the slimed walls. His whole body was screaming now, his fouled blood a thick black acid, eating away at flesh and bone. He could no longer feel his feet. He gasped as he stumbled and almost fell. Righting himself his knuckles knocked against the rough edges of his hewn-out recess. He had found the place.
The cravings roared and screamed in his ears as he tore frenziedly at the wall, ripping his fingers on the sharp rubble of mortar as he felt for the loose brick. It moved beneath his hand. The seconds it took to extricate it were unbearable. At last he hurled the brick across the tunnel, his other hand snatching frenziedly at the handle of his knife. There was a splash, a faint groan. The thick black stream swirled around him. It was almost at his thighs now. He ripped wildly at the sleeve of his coat. The stink of decomposition crowded his head, the stink of death. He could make them out now, strewn along the grey banks, the shrivelled black corpses of his fellow soldiers. Somewhere, muffled by snow or distance, a bombardment thundered. The darkness flashed with splatters of fire. His arm screamed for the blade but the fear was stronger, sucking his feet down into the thick mud of the trench. There would be no relief tonight, no leaking dawn to call him back. The enemy was all around him, steadily edging forward, edging forward, crawling towards him in their inexorable thousands, a clodded plough of grey, noiseless in the snow. They came from left and right, advancing on him from behind, from in front, their grey arms reaching out from the fog over his head, their bayonets slicing up through the earth beneath his feet. They had no object but him. They closed around him, tighter and tighter. There were columns of them now, advancing and advancing. There would be no end to them. William shrank back into the recess in the wall, his blade clutched in his arms like an infant. His breath came in tattered ribbons. He could not move.
They were on him now. William could hear their moans, the liquid suck of their breath. They had come for William, their bayonets drawn. He could see them as they moved relentlessly forward, ramming their blades again and again into the thick flesh of the night. William would die here, in this brutish hell of mud and ice. His corpse would be hurled with a thousand others into a pit and the mud would fill his mouth and press itself into his unclosed eyes. The fear choked him, twisting his guts and clutching at the flesh between his ribs. He did not want to die. He must not die. His hands clenched around the handle of his knife. Without breaking the skin he stroked the sharp blade very deliberately down his neck and along the flesh of his exposed arm. The Russians stumbled in the darkness. They were close now, very close. Someone cried out, a low gurgling noise like water sucked down a drain. William's fear crackled into the blade, setting it alight. All of a sudden his head was flooded with hot black blood. Throwing himself from his hiding place he stabbed blindly into the darkness. But he was no longer alone. Someone else was out there, in the darkness. The air was thick with the moans of the enemy as the ranks of slaughtered men collapsed into the stream, the splashes flashing silver in the dark night. They fell one on top of the other, blood spreading in black pools across the dirty grey of their coats. He was closer now. William pressed himself back into the wall. He saw him only for a moment, his face a faint white moon in the pale glow of his lamp as he pressed something into a gap in the sandbags that lined the trench. But William knew him. The relief watch. The soldier did not speak. Instead he turned away, moving swiftly up the trench towards the guard post. William was saved. From behind him there came a long ghastly moan as life leaked from a man's body like sand. Exultantly, his eyes closed, William raised his blade and thrust it down again and again into the mass of corpses before him. The silent scream of pain in his arm was a cry of perfect victory.
At last, a black blizzard blowing itself out, the clamour in William's head cleared. Time had slipped. Dark blood congealed in his hand, barely warm. But he felt none of the sense of calm that always infused him at these times. Instead he felt nauseous, dizzy, disturbed. There was too much about this that was wrong. He was in the sewers, he held a knife in his hand, his arm throbbed. These things were familiar. The blackouts were familiar too but not like this. Always in the past he had mislaid time, hours sometimes that he could not account for. This time, in a way he could not begin to explain, he had lost himself. He shivered violently. He was half-frozen. He wore not his sewer uniform but his best suit of clothes. He had no light. The tide was up to his thighs and moving so strongly that he had to set his legs hard against the pull of the current. Most unsettling of all, he was filled with a terrible certainty that he had not been alone. He had to get out.
Thrusting his knife deep into his pocket he stumbled backwards, uphill, towards the exit, struggling against the downward pull of the rising water. He walked as fast as he could but the darkness was as thick as serge. He shook his head, too, but he could not dislodge the strange unsettling fragments that scraped beneath his skull like the remains of a dream. His feet shrieking with pain as he thawed them before a meagre peat fire, his fingers fumbling with the pencil as he completed the watch log. The back of his head alight with autumn sunlight as his brush traced the delicate violet veins of the pale toadflax. The splattered arc of blood on canvas as the blade of a bayonet tore through the wall of a tent. The walls of the tunnels crumbling around him, threatening to bury him alive. Hawke's voice slicing through the darkness, gleaming with menace. And through it all the relief watch, guardian angel and spectre of death, warm and ghostly as breath in the winter darkness.
At the top of the slope, where he was accustomed to straighten up, his head still grazed the low roof. Perhaps the rising tide affected the bed of the stream. He pressed forward. It was not far now. By his calculations the grating should be only a little further along, leading out of a broad tunnel on his right. He felt for the archway with his hands, forcing himself to endure the slimy flesh of the fungi that sprouted along the brickwork, but the wall was solid and there was not the faintest hint of light. The tunnel felt narrower than he remembered but then the darkness altered a man's perceptions, skewing his relationship with space and time. The channel was surely no more than a few yards further on. Biting sharply upon his lip he fumbled along the channel.
Abruptly it curved sharply to the right. William did not remember any curve. Had he missed the turning? He should have been able to stand easily in this part of the system but instead the crown of the tunnel lowered. If he held out his arms his fingertips touched both walls simultaneously. That was not right either. Even the grain of the course beneath his feet was unfamiliar. The mud was deeper than it should be here and tumbled with sharp stones. He struggled to keep himself steady. The stream rushed past him, so that he had to lean into it to remain upright. As he lowered his
head a fine mist of frozen filth insinuated itself into his nostrils, his mouth. The stench of excrement and rotting seaweed was sickening. He felt the panic start to choke him.
The tide was rising faster now, he was sure of it. He had to get out before the river pulled him under, flooding his lungs with the city's ceaseless stream of excrement. He needed to head upstream, away from the sluice gates to the river where the force of the water through the iron flaps would surely crush him. On and on into the darkness he pushed. His foot struck a wall. He felt into the darkness. Brick. Solid brick. The end of the tunnel. He was trapped. Desperately he wheeled around, pushing back the way he had come. His legs were lead weights, exhausted with the effort of propelling him through the water. The maze of tunnels forked, curved, sloped, and William stumbled along them wildly, thoughtlessly, everything in him straining towards the idea of the light. But he found no light, no escape. The tunnels narrowed, their walls crumbling around him, their courses treacherous. William lost his footing, was carried backwards by the stinking stream, struggled to stand again and pressed forwards. The knife in his pocket slashed at his leg. He scraped his knuckles, his forehead, banged his shoulders and his knees. As though from a long way off he heard his own voice echoing in the darkness, strange and high-pitched, forcing forth a jumble of vicious threats and endearments. He prayed, shouting the words into the darkness, pleading with God to restore him to his faith as he cursed Him for deserting him. And still the tunnels lured him on, taking him deeper and deeper into the depths of the earth, the whole suffocating weight of the metropolis pressing down upon him, burying him alive. And still the tide rose. The darkness bulged with guttural knocks and echoes. William knew they were the forces of Hell sent to receive him. They were not far behind him now. He had almost nothing left for the fight.
The tide was almost to his waist. William stumbled onwards, his hands flailing paddles in the filthy stream. He made hardly any progress now. The cold had penetrated into the innermost parts of him. His body shook uncontrollably. With each step, tunnel blurred into trench and trench into tunnel. He was tired. He was so tired. If he could only make it till the next watch, to the grating, till the relief arrived. He was so tired. He moved his legs only with the greatest concentration of effort. But ahead of him — he stared. The darkness was lifting. The edges of night were streaked with the first watery filaments of day. There would be green coffee back at the camp if he had the strength to roast it. If there was enough wood for a fire. If he could only keep on walking. He had to keep walking. A soldier must never abandon his post. Then his foot struck a rock and he stumbled, falling forwards on to a heap of what he took for sandbags. He did not have the strength to stand again. But the light was brighter now. The sun — or was it the moon? — swung above him, round and white and blinding. It hurt his eyes to look at it. And beside the light, so bright that he seemed made up of the light itself, was the figure of a man. Light made man. The Almighty God, Maker of heaven and earth. Forgive us our trespasses. Beside him was a small white dog. Within its scarlet mouth its teeth were sharp as knives. William felt the terror rise in him. The light was a trick, a beacon to lead him towards the fires of eternal damnation. Father, Oh, Father, why have You forsaken me?
And then he saw the man's face.
'Mr Rawlinson?'
Robert Rawlinson seemed quite oblivious to the filthy river that coursed around him. His glossy hat shone and his starched neckcloth was crisp and perfectly white. The dog too was white, white as fresh Crimean snow.
'Mr May,' Rawlinson asked gravely. 'Do you mean to die?'
William gazed up at him, dazzled by the light. He wanted to weep with relief.
'Is — is it dawn?'
Rawlinson considered him thoughtfully. Then he placed his hands beneath William's armpits and hauled him up to stand. He was strong. He spoke to William although the words were lost in the roar of the stream. Then, slinging William's arm around his neck, he half-carried him along the surging torrent of the submerged trench. William let his head fall against Rawlinson's shoulder.
'We shall have to bury them,' William whispered. 'The bodies. We shall have to go back and bury them.'
'Hush now,' Rawlinson said gently. William was silent, his hand around the reassuring shape of the knife handle in his pocket. He had no strength for further questions. He barely noticed as Rawlinson bundled him upwards and on to a dirt floor. His tent? Perhaps. He was no longer in the river, that he knew, but he knew it distantly, without relief. Pushed now by Rawlinson's hand between his shoulder blades, he stumbled a few more steps. The air changed. The breeze on his sodden clothes chilled him so that he shuddered violently. Then his knees gave way. The ground was hard and uncomfortably rutted. Rawlinson bent over him for a moment, loosening his clothes, settling him to sleep. Then he was no longer there. Laying his head down on the frozen mud, May closed his eyes.
XII
The appearance of the stranger rattled Tom something proper. What with it being lateish and the tide on the up, he'd been sure the two of them'd have the tunnels to themselves. He'd reckoned on no more than a quick in-and-out, now that the fight was almost upon her. He wanted Lady fresh. But then he'd had the fancy of seeking her out a little something by the way of a good luck charm. The thought twined around him like a weed till it had him quite wrapped up. It didn't have to be something special. Perhaps a coin, strung on a length of ribbon around her neck by way of a medal. He wasn't about to go to any proper trouble. It was only when he got towards his former toshing grounds he figured it wouldn't hurt to have a rummage beneath some of the gratings, for old time's sake. There was time enough to spare, after all, and you learned to follow your instincts in a game like the tosh. You never knew your luck.
He was directly under the grating at the east point of Regent-circus when he heard him. It was a tricky shaft with a long gully, so that to get your fingers into the sludge you had to lay yourself on a sloping ledge with your arm buried almost to the shoulder. Lady lay silently on his back, settling herself afresh whenever he shifted about. He couldn't remember the last time he'd toshed here. There were usually decent pickings to be had — there was a cab stand at the junction with Coventry-street and the bits and pieces that got themselves dropped in the manure had a habit of getting overlooked — but you had to be careful to mind your step. The grating fell away direct from the street and if the peelers cared to have a peer beneath their boots you'd be lucky if they didn't stare you straight in the face. Any commotion in the tunnels would have them down on him hard as a cellar door. Meanwhile your boots was stuck right out in the tunnel beneath, clear as a bell and twice as tempting to anyone who might be coming along behind. It would be easy to miss hearing them with the clatter of the street echoing round your skull.
But you'd have had to be deafer than a stone to miss this one. Pulling out his arm with the slow twisting movement that kept the mud quiet, Tom slithered down the ledge into the stream, taking Lady into his arms. The water was high, too high. He'd let the gully get the better of him. Lady licked his ear but he shook her off so as to listen. They were lucky. The noise was coming from the west. Slick as a fish in the black stream he headed east, towards the cavern.
The cavern was a low raised space like a long step over the main sewer. Most likely it'd once been the outfall from a tributary stream. The story went that, years before, back when Tom was still a lad, one of the old coves had uncovered an anchor here, buried in the mud. They said it had made the tosher's fortune, that somehow or other he'd sold it to the government and they kept it in a glass case to this day, somewhere over Greenwich way where folks paid a shilling a time for the chance to get a gawp at it. Tom had his doubts about the truth of that story but he did know there'd never been a stream here in his time. With nothing to keep it occupied the outfall had half collapsed. You could only head up the tunnel a matter of feet before a tumble of masonry blocked it right off. In recent years another fall had good as closed off the entrance so unless you knew it you wer
en't likely to suspect there was anything there at all. The height of it meant you had to squat but it was dry, even when the tide was coming up fast. Tom knew they'd be safe there for a good while. He set Lady down and crouched against the wall. They were both breathing hard.
The man was getting closer. He made no effort to be silent, gabbling away to himself, his breath coming out in strange little groans like a sixpenny jade. Surely he couldn't be a flusher. Flushers always came down in twos or threes. Besides, you could always tell a flusher a mile off from the stretched-out suck of the sludge as they rolled their feet out of the mud. Seemed that to be a flusher you had to walk that way. Bill liked to claim it was because flushers, not being creatures of the smartest persuasion, put their dinners into their boots for safe keeping and lived every step in mortal fear of crushing them. But by the sounds of it this one wasn't worrying himself about where he was putting his feet. You could hear the splashes and the curses as he stumbled. He was getting closer all the time. Of all the nights, Tom thought angrily to himself. Extra bother tonight'd really foul things up. He cocked his head, listening. The words were clearer now, although there wasn't nothing much in the way of sense to them, and they tumbled over one another, for all the world arguing with themselves.
'Why do you leave me here? It's so dark, so bloody dark. Don't be afraid, William. Don't be afraid, my sweet William. I am with you. Though you walk alone through the valley of the shadow of death, God will guide and comfort you. The merciful Lord succours those who have done their duty. Have you done your duty? Have you? Fix your bayonet, May. Who knows where they may be hiding? You must never sleep. Oh God, why do you abandon me in my suffering? I am not afraid of the dark. In the light our deeds will be shown for what they truly are. It's so damned dark. I have done my duty. God and Empire. How can I march when the blood makes the going so slippy? There is no Heaven and no Hell, you hear me? Only darkness. Blood and shit and darkness for all eternity. Oh Jesus, where the hell are they? Where are the others?'