The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The publicly-known facts in the matter of Gideon Carnot are that he was deputised by the District board of directors to investigate certain irregularities in works going on under the control of its sister-line, the Metropolitan. The two corporations were at the time negotiating the future of the Circle line, and the nexus of the two lines was, of course, Paddington Station. Officially, Carnot then disappeared until he was pulled from the rubble of a collapsed tunnel beneath that station seven days later, injured and not in his wits. He retired to the family home where he remained out of sight for many years, the stigma of a mental breakdown ensuring that polite society – and the board of the District – did their best to pretend he had never existed. In 1884 the house was sold to pay debts and Carnot ended up in Berkshire Asylum, where he ended his days soon after.

  By dint of determined investigation Watts had unearthed considerable further evidence concerning Carnot’s exploits and fate. As prologue, she had a handwritten memo to Carnot from three directors of the Board directing him to secure yourself several men of capability and enter covertly into the works beneath the station in order to ensure that the excavations there situate do not pose a further financial risk to the extension of the District Line.

  “‘several men of capability,’” I mused. “Sounds a little racy for our field.”

  “Doesn’t it just,” Watts agreed with one of her irreverent grins. “Look, here,” and she had a handful of photocopies that appeared to detail expenses. “Always follow the money when you can,” she explained. “These were in a box in the storeroom right here in the Transport Museum, if you can believe it.”

  I looked over them. Individuals called Cooper and Ashworth had charged for lamps, fuel, rope and other equipment suitable for spelunking. More alarmingly, someone with a wild hand and an illegible signature had put in a claim for ammunition of three separate calibres and some mining explosives.

  “Theodore Grant-Souborne, based on other samples of his writing,” Watts explained. “He was something of an adventurer, went all over the Empire oppressing the natives, like you Brits are good at. A bit of a celebrity even, except he vanishes from sight around this time. But that’s not the craziest part.” And she showed me a list of necessaries apparently purchased by someone named Amelia Cecil, whose small, neat letters listed opium and cocaine in quantities that would have the modern-day vice squad scrabbling for their handcuffs.

  “She was a psychic and ghost hunter,” Watts explained. She had a photo of a young, intense-looking woman in a high-collared gown. “Again, nobody mentions her after the Carnot expedition.”

  “Expedition?”

  “Well, isn’t it? What else would you call this?” Her grin was back. “Fighter, mage, couple of rogues. Only thing they were missing was a cleric.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said stuffily.

  “Well, another thing nobody has any idea about is what actually happened. They set out on November 4th, according to this. Carnot turned up alone on the 11th, babbling like a loon and with both legs broken. That’s a long time to be lost under Paddington Station.”

  “So where did your rubbings come from?”

  Her grin widened to truly Cheshire Cat proportions. “I found them among Carnot’s papers, when I went to the old family home. It’s some training retreat for your Civil Service now, but one thing the Civil Service is really bad at is throwing stuff away. Had to put my charm into overdrive, but they let me into the attic, where I found this little lot.”

  Her treasure trove was a box of loose papers, yellowed with age and in a very poor condition. Some were stained or torn, still more were actually singed.

  “Someone’s tried to burn them.”

  “Someone’s succeeded in burning quite a lot of them. I’ve ordered them as best I can. There are big gaps. I…” She shrugged. “I can’t prove anything but I wonder if Carnot didn’t try to destroy them when he had to leave the house for the asylum.”

  “Well, he was unbalanced,” I admitted.

  “Or else it was the only sane impulse he had left,” Watts murmured with what I thought was unnecessary drama.

  We pored over the papers in instalments over the next few months. They were handwritten in the shaky hand of the inmate and much that was legible remained disjoined, non sequitur after non sequitur tumbling out as Carnot’s recollections churned.

  There was a fair chunk of the earliest writing which was relatively coherent, and it appeared that the writer had begun the account in an attempt to exorcise the demons which were plaguing him. He refers to his companions – the same names as in those expenses claims – and specifically notes that only he was fully briefed as to what they were to find. Of that purpose, no complete picture existed in the fragments we retained. Certainly there had been some alarm bells ringing at the District Line regarding the works below Paddington, but Carnot’s concerns do not seem to be solely financial or even structural – as evidenced by his choice of companions.

  There was a passage that caught my attention because it recalled the words of Mr Leary. Carnot goes into some detail as to the labourers employed at the deep works by the Metropolitan Line. He says:

  As reported they make a very curious, even unnerving spectacle. They are sullen and say nothing but, perhaps, single words relating to their tasks, instructions to one another, or confirmations of readiness. The uniformity of their work dress seems almost to have bled into their faces. Each has an identically stoic expression that scarcely changes, and indeed the features bearing those expressions have little variation as though all these slab-faced, slope-shouldered mechanicals were hired from the same remote and inbred village. Cooper kept watch from our hide last night and witnessed an accident where a sling of iron scaffolding came down on two men. He reported, in a shaken voice, that no warning was called by the others, though they must have seen what was to occur, nor did the killed men make any cry or sound as the weight descended on them, nor anyone apparently lament their passing. The remaining workers simply cleared away the wreckage, both organic and inorganic, and resumed work. No word was sent for police or doctors. The one advantage in this strangeness is that these men seem so focused and unobservant that slipping by them shall be easily accomplished.

  I showed Watts notes of my conversation with Leary, which echoed this. True to form, she just laughed. “I read this as Carnot the high-falutin twit being stuffy about the working class.”

  “We were right to be concerned,” Carnot wrote, in one of the last segments where his script is easily legible.

  Of the days he spent out of sight of the sun, little has survived; it is here his most ardent attempts at destruction were focused. What remained showed a hand growing increasingly disordered, sentences collapsing into occult notation. Watts had already collected surviving fragments, copied them and arranged them as best she could, with her own guesses as to what might be missing. Amanda Cecil features frequently, and there is the suggestion that she was in some way guiding them through whatever underworld they had uncovered. We also retained scraps of his speculation about the spaces they were exploring: that some were plainly recently dug but that there were lower chambers, occasionally glimpsed, which they were trying to access. At some point all mention of Ashworth and Grant-Sourborne simply ceases, with no surviving clue as to their fate.

  As well as the Braille-like rubbings, two were three sketches preserved, each with a brittle brownish edge to show how close they had come to the fire. One seemed to show some manner of duct-work or piping, or perhaps bizarre Heath Robinsonesque machinery. The other was a sketch of some chamber, the floor and ceiling ribbed and veined with what looked almost like vines. A central column rising floor to ceiling, widest in its midsection, made Watts comment, “TARDIS control console, what do you think?”

  I confessed I had never seen the popular television programme in question.

  There was no immediate context for these images. Instead Carnot devotes his writing to some bizarre speculat
ions by Cecil concerning the workforce. She refers to servants able to carry great burdens, who knew no voices save their masters’ – which, I suppose, is what all masters want of their servants. There is also talk about such servants being un-biddable, and these unnamed masters settling on lesser workers, imperfect and inadequate for the task. I speculated that this referred to the rise of socialism amongst the lower classes in the mid-nineteenth century. Watts was not convinced.

  Cecil was also apparently a fan of the Symmes’ Hollow Earth hypothesis. Carnot felt it important to record her ramblings about a connection to some kind of polar lost world, and talk of some growing horror at the South Pole inexplicably related to the works they were exploring. I wondered how much of her illicit expedition supplies Cecil had consumed by then.

  The pride of Watts’ restoration was a single complete page, maniacally scrawled, that must have come within the midst of the destroyed section. I imagined the deranged Carnot clawing up great handfuls of sheets towards the fire, and this one leaf falling free, unremarked. As best as we could decipher it, it read:

  …says that when the masters first built their great house they gave their time to the upkeep and raising of servants who should do most anything for them and never answer them back save in their own voices. But the servants overthrew their masters and sit in their house and multiply and grow clever and call to the stars in their master’s tones. She says the masters heard them long ago and knew they must stem them before their servants found the keys that might unlock all their masters’ doors. But the masters could not call on such servants, for they were all in arms, and so…

  It seemed curious that Carnot’s concerns were for such a domestic matter.

  The final section of the papers that Watts had ordered relates to an encounter Carnot claimed to have had with one of the subterranean labourers of the Metropolitan Line. By this time he is apparently alone, Cooper and Cecil lost or abandoned, and has been trying to find his way out of the tunnels. He speaks about finding his way back from “that sunless place” and also “the unlit city”, which I nervously ascribed to London at night. He refers to finding some manner of hatch or opening leading back up – or that is my interpretation of his choice of the word – “portal.” He writes: “The others had to take their chances,” and that is the last reference we hear to any of his companions.

  Then, as far as we could piece the narrative together, Carnot was heading for the surface when he ran into some of the Metropolitan workmen. What may have happened, precisely, is unclear. He refers to them in terms of abject horror, certainly, and then, in the next coherent section, he refers to the roof coming down on them all, Watts speculated about Grant-Souborne’s explosives, but in truth we had no evidence either way.

  This tunnel collapse was what crushed Carnot’s legs and, if he is to be believed, killed several of the labourers. He was then left in the dark, in incredible pain, for an unknown period of time before the rescuers dug down to him.

  According to Carnot’s account, he was not alone down there. There is – almost – nothing in the rescuers’ accounts to support this contention. Certainly Carnot’s was the only body drawn from the collapse, living or dead.

  However, Carnot – meaning the madman thinking back to a time when he must have been doubly mad with pain – writes that he was trapped down there with a labourer, one of those men he had so unkindly described at the outset. The man had plainly also been injured – though Carnot uses the word “damaged.” When Carnot regained consciousness, he reports that his fellow casualty’s condition had apparently made the man loquacious.

  He plainly devoted considerable time to reproducing the feverish babbling of the trapped workman, although only four charred fragments survived, and I reproduce them here in full:

  Spoke of needing to repair the line. Gathering mass at the pole. Feedback beyond safe parameters.

  Repair before feedback floods the system. Asked what then. The end rushing down the branch line to the station until all their lines and termini were undone.

  Left too long unmaintained. Can’t get the staff, they say. The servants rose up, they say. What was made can’t be unmade. Too much pressure. Can’t repair the line until it’s tapped.

  And, the final fragment: He has gone. He has finished speaking and gone back to what he came from. The servants only ever had the words of others, he said. The elder servants had the words of elder masters. The inferior servants have our own to speak back at us. He has no more words. He has gone back to what he came from. I lit my lamp and saw. God help me, I wish I had not. In the lamplight I saw him flowing.

  That is all we have of the final account of Gideon Carnot. Watts and I agreed that it must represent the ramblings of a fevered and pain-deranged mind, that the words originated in Carnot’s own disordered brain, and that he had imagined his supposed companion. After reading through his harrowing ravings, that was a comforting enough conclusion, save for one thing. There is an account in the newspapers, a statement made by one of the rescuers. It quotes, “Further efforts to find Mr Carnot’s alleged companion uncovered only a workman’s ruined and soiled clothing.”

  The Descent

  It was with Miss Watts that Lewis Yon first made contact.

  For a few months my investigations had been curtailed by other professional duties. However, the peculiarities of the Paddington Station works were never that far from my mind. Of course Carnot had been deranged when he had written – and then partially erased – his account. He had been trapped, in agony and in darkness, for a long time. His companions – the existence of whom was amply evidenced – had not returned, perhaps claimed by some kindred collapse unreported in the newspapers. Such an experience is likely to impact on the most stable of psyches. Reading too much into such things is the province of an over-active imagination.

  Of course, Watts was well furnished with such an imagination, and she and I remained in contact after our exhaustive perusal of the Carnot papers. I was aware that she continued to collect material for her book on the man, though it never seemed to near completion. At the same time the Yerkes book, which actually bore the expectations of a major US publisher, languished entirely untouched.

  In that time she occasionally sent me details of incidents which seemed to echo Carnot. A lunatic had killed a workman on the Metropolitan line in 1893, crying for the deaths of “the servants” and expressing an ardent opinion that they must be kept down or they would rise up to destroy everyone. The culprit was a scion of an elevated family escaped from private care and so an understandable interpretation was put on his words.

  In 1922, a well-known eccentric and a score of his followers had attempted to enter the Circle Line tunnel on foot claiming it contained a hidden underground route to the South Pole, and had to be forcibly prevented. In 1947, a shell-shocked soldier returned from the war was killed on the tracks at Paddington, going under a train as he wrestled with some manner of hatch between the rails. His last words had been “Release the pressure!”

  “There surely can’t be something about Paddington Station that drives people mad,” I complained to Watts.

  “Perhaps there’s something about being mentally unbalanced that opens people up to Paddington Station?” she suggested.

  Two days later she called me in some excitement and said that she needed to meet with me. She had been contacted by one of the workmen – not some subcontractor, but one of the core workforce maintained by the shadowy main contractor. In short, one of the very men than Mr Leary had so complained of. This was Lewis Yon.

  I’m not sure what I expected, going to meet him. My head was full of Carnot’s report of slab-faced, taciturn brutes who could watch their colleagues get killed without shedding a tear. Yon was a big man, certainly: over six feet and broad shouldered. His eyes were a little skewed, the left wandering sometimes as though conducting a patrolling surveillance not shared by the right. He had a long face, the mouth downturned, the eyes melancholy. I was braced for some sense o
f the unnatural, perhaps, but the chief impression was that he was tired. He looked to be around fifty, his short-cut hair shot with grey and his large frame starting to hollow out. He smoked every moment he was outside and drank cup after cup of strong tea – at our expense – during our meeting, both habits like an addict who has built up a resistance to the drugs that once fuelled him.

  “Heard of you two, asking questions,” he told us. His tone wasn’t friendly, and I wondered if Watts had brought me along as a security measure. If so, I reckoned Yon could break the two of us in half without us being able to do much about it. Thankfully, we were meeting publicly in a café – a greasy spoon of a place three streets away from Paddington.

  “Heard from whom?” Watts asked him.

  Yon shrugged. “People.” He stared at us. “You were asking about the marks, before.”

  “That was me,” I confirmed. “The dots and stars. You’ve seen them.”

  He nodded slowly. “Oh, seen them, all right. Whole walls of them, down below.”

  Watts and I exchanged wide-eyed glances. “Can you … show us them?” she asked.

  “Gone now.” The thought seemed to exhaust him still further. “Knocked down for the works.”

  I suspect Watts and I both knew the instant agony of the scholar, discovering that some piece of history is gone forever.

  “Didn’t need ’em any more,” Yon added obscurely. “Been asking other questions, though, eh?” He glowered at Watts. “All sorts that’s gone on, on the Line.”

  Watts nodded cautiously. We were both expecting a threat.

  “Ain’t right.” Yon stared into his teacup and got the café owner to refill it. “Something ain’t right with it.”

  “Could you be more specific?” I enquired.

  He glared at me with one eye. “None of it makes sense. Pipes and wires and crawlspaces all shot through everywhere under the station. None of it connects. And sometimes when you go to dig, it’s dug out for you, like they came and did it years back and covered it over and forgot. And you do forget. Day in, day out: go to the works and can’t think what you did yesterday. There’s only today’s work. Nothing connects up.”