The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  We both bent closer to hear for his voice seemed to be drying up to a parched whisper, no matter how much tea he doused it with.

  “What about the other contractors, the outside men?” I pressed him, thinking of Leary.

  “Don’t do the hard work. Do the above work, the stuff the public’ll see. Not grubbing in the dirt like us, digging up who knows what, finding … finding spaces where there shouldn’t be spaces. Don’t get…”

  “Don’t get what?” Watts asked.

  Yon turned haunted eyes on us. “We get sick,” said his ghost of a voice. “Something wears you out, down there. Seen men just … give up. Don’t care, the bosses. They’re breaking us.”

  “The work’s that hard?” she queried.

  “Not the work, the place,” Yon insisted. “Place is doing it to us.”

  “Well then I don’t understand why you keep at it,” Watts told him, baffled.

  The look he gave us was sickly incredulous. “Can’t stop the work,” he hissed, as though confronted with some kind of blue collar sacrilege. “It’s almost done.”

  “They told you that?”

  “Must be almost done because we’re almost done. Men I worked with for … for a time, a long time. Getting sick and you don’t see ’em again, but no more coming in to replace them. They’re wearing us out, all of us.” As if for emphasis he hacked out a cough that sent a fat line of phlegm across the tabletop, veined with dark lines. “Won’t be long now,” he got out. “Can’t be. S’why I came to you.”

  Watts and I exchanged another glance. “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I want to see,” Yon told us fiercely. “Know it’s down there, and I’m going to find it, the heart of it, what it’s all about. And I’ll take you. Don’t know how long I’ve got. Not feeling good these days, not since … time. Since a time ago. But someone should know what they’ve done to us. If you’ll go.”

  *

  We went; of course we went. Lewis Yon met us outside the station and guided us in. Paddington was still busy even at that hour, and we could hear the works over the traffic. He had hi-vis jackets and helmets for us, and a clipboard, to pose as some nebulous form of inspector. We tried for a brisk, assured stride as we followed after Yon into the station and then down into the construction site, and nobody glanced at us twice. We passed the bright livery of various subcontractors, and had brief glimpses of men working on the public-facing areas of the station, talking and swearing and laughing on occasion. None of this was what we had come to see, and Yon kept leading us downwards. Soon the sound of human voices was muffled, and only the clatter and clang of the inanimate could be heard from before us. The dimming of reassuring sounds put me uncomfortably in mind of being buried alive.

  Then, turning a corner and clattering down a flight of scaffolding stairs, we were amongst Yon’s fellows. There were a dozen of them in view, crammed into a space too small for them and each of them working diligently, laying wires or connecting ducting.

  They all had a similarity with Yon, as though they all shared some uncertain ethnicity or distant family connection. It was not as marked as Carnot had written of, but certainly there was something about them. More, they all shared Yon’s general impression of exhaustion. They regarded us with stony expressions on their long faces. Yon nodded, and they nodded back, and eyes flicked to us but nobody asked any questions.

  “Where’s Dave,” Yon asked. For a long time they just stared at him, then one shook his head, and the rest did, too, as though silent negation was somehow contagious.

  “Dave,” Yon said, not forcefully, just in his hoarse used-up voice. “Said he would meet me. Was here when we did the … the work on … the other day.”

  More head shaking, and it became apparent that whatever malady was attacking these men had prevented this Dave from turning up for work.

  Neither Watts nor I had thought about protection from whatever it was that was attacking Yon and the rest. Right then, seeing these worn-out, grey-faced men I thought of viruses and radioactivity and who knew what buried horrors they could have broken into. Tiredness, loss of memory, illness – there are plenty of perfectly mundane hazards capable of causing these symptoms.

  But we were there. We wanted to see.

  Before Yon led us further, one of the men took up a walkie-talkie from where it was clipped to his chest. I thought he was going to report us, but instead he just listened. What issued from it sounded to me like audio feedback, just a weird, ear-tweaking whistling and keening. I assumed there were words lost within it, for they had all got back to work the moment the transmission ended, sparing Watts and I the occasional forlorn glance.

  Yon coughed at length, hacking up what seemed like a lung-full of discoloured mucus. At last he straightened up, wheezing, and beckoned us to follow him.

  We were heading down again. He opened up a circular hatch like a manhole and just let himself drop through it, turning on his torch below. Watts and I joined him in its wan radiance.

  The torch showed us a broad circular tunnel, far larger than I would have expected and set at a slant. This was what Leary had spoken of and, if he were to be believed, it must access the regular underground train network up above.

  “This is for … repairs? So they can divert trains off the track?” I hazarded. I knew that London’s subterranean rail lines suffer from only having single tracks, rather than having two, where one can be maintained while the other runs. “Mr Yon, what is this?”

  We could only see the pale ghost of Yon’s face in the darkness. “What they told us to build. What the instructions said.”

  And then he was heading off downslope and taking our only light with him, leaving us hurrying to keep up.

  “Do you hear something?” Watts whispered. “Sort of … pipes, wind?”

  Her ears were keener than mine. What I had noted was the breeze, though. Just as Leary had noted, there was a constant, gentle movement of the air, and it was washing past us – not out towards the open but deeper in. The temperature was dropping as well. The torchlight showed Watts’ and my breaths pluming like silver mist whenever Yon stopped to let us catch up.

  Soon after, we were out of the big tunnel, through a side hatch so flush I would never have seen it on my own. That led to a concrete-lined pipe set vertically in the earth, with corroded iron rungs as handholds. Yon slung his torch around his neck for the descent, and we followed him down with some trepidation. I tried to guess at our depth, but I reckoned we were already deeper than any tube works were supposed to be.

  As we crept down, hand over hand, a grumbling murmur reached me: Yon, muttering to himself.

  “Running out of time,” he mumbled. “Not up to the job. Have to do our best, but so tired.” And then, grotesquely, a scrap of song. “Show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I want to go to bed…”

  “Did you go down here before, Mr Yon?” Watts called.

  The ghoulish singing stopped, and then he grunted back, “No. Not in the plans.” A thunderous bout of coughing rang along the pipe. “Know it’s down there, though. Know that’s where it’s coming from, what wears us out. Want to see it just once. And you…”

  “We’ll see, and we’ll get back,” Watts promised, somewhat optimistically.

  Then the light was abruptly fading, as Yon reached the bottom and stepped beyond the edge of the pipe. Soon enough we were all standing down there, in a tunnel low enough that I had to duck and Yon had to stoop low.

  “Look,” Watts hissed. On the ceiling were marks – Carnot’s dots, as she had called them. There had obviously been quite a panel of them, but the intrusion of the pipe had obliterated much. “Barbarous,” she tutted. “I don’t understand how they just destroyed all of this.”

  “Didn’t need them,” Yon said. “Carried ’em out already.”

  “I say, what?” I asked him. “Carried out what?”

  “Instructions.” And then he was loping off down the tunnel, almost bent double. The walls around us were a
mishmash of stone, concrete, tiling and close-packed rubble. None of it looked safe, and much of it looked as though the original builders had just taken whatever they had found lying around above, and thrown it together. We were constantly tripping and stumbling over the uneven floor, always falling behind Yon and his light. I had faint glimpses of more of the imprints, but no time or chance to study them.

  Then Yon stopped. He had found a point where the dots and starfish had been overlaid with something else. It was a bas relief covering one side of the tunnel for a good twenty feet, too grand in scale for us to be able to see it properly, bounded as we were by the cramped walls.

  “What is this doing down here? I thought we were below anywhere the public could go?” Watts asked, but Yon just stared.

  It told a story in sequence, this relief, and I thought of the only people who had ever been down here, those slab-faced, plodding workers. The style was simple, powerful, almost Brutalist, although it must have predated the movement by decades. It showed men of two stripes engaged in a sequence of interactions: workers and managers; servants and masters. The servants were solid, broad-shouldered, iconic and identifiable in caps and overalls; the others were barrel-bodied, looking like the Fat Controller in tails and top hats. It was a Victorian conceit of class warfare. In the beginning the workers were tiny, spilling from the hands of their masters or crushed underfoot. They were everywhere, working in a city of bizarre perspective but familiar landmarks, a London designed by M.C. Escher. As the panels went on the labourers grew larger until at last they loomed over their employers, who were shown in attitudes of fear and distress. In the penultimate panel they workers had their bosses by the throat in a display of proletariat might and were casting them down. The last panel was the most affecting, because of the way it played with space and composition. The city was filled with the massive bodies of the workers, tessellated together in weird, uncomfortable positions as they strained against the very boundary of the bas relief.

  Down here, men had worked silently and obediently since the middle of the Nineteenth Century, sullen and silent and hard. But at some point some of them had broken from their labours to make this remarkable, hidden record.

  “They were complaining about their lot,” I mused.

  But Watts was shaking her head, and her voice shook, too, when she said, “‘But the servants overthrew their masters and sit in their house and multiply’, remember? I think it’s … a history. As best they could record it.”

  We pressed on, and soon afterwards Yon stopped again, his light this time unequal to the task of illuminating what he had stumbled into.

  We had seen it before. I knew from her gasp that Watts must recognise it just as much as I. It was the cave from Carnot’s drawing, with the swollen column at its heart. Carnot had been a poor artist, though. He had not done that outlandish central feature justice, and besides, there were other aspects of that chamber that no pen and paper could record. Even I had a bizarre sense of vertigo, stepping out past Yon into that toroid space beneath the earth. In truth it was perhaps twenty yards across, wall to wall, and no more than ten feet high, but I had the sense of a far greater distance hidden somewhere within it, a gulf that might reach out and swallow me. Watts saw more, God help her. Her mind was more open to that place than mine.

  What I do remember was the quiet. That cave should have cast our voices back and forth in a cacophony of echoes, but instead the sound just receded away, as though there were distances in that place which the eye could not account for.

  Lewis Yon was waiting by the entrance, his torch directed out like a weapon. His hand shook with it, and when the light touched his face, his skin glittered with sweat despite the icy chill that suffused the chamber. I called him over to examine the column, which I saw was ornately worked, but with the details lost in the interplay of shadows and the unsteady beam. He took three steps into the chamber and then halted, and I could hear him whisper to himself again, some fearful abjuration.

  I thought we must be in some place very old indeed, some Stone-age temple buried beneath London for thousands of years. I took the column for an idol.

  Its centre, the broadest part of it, was like a ridged barrel, with whorled and knotted mounds at regular spaces around its midsection, like coiled bunches of vines. At its base it spread out into a five-pointed pedestal, the ridges of which ran along the floor for more than the length of a man before ending in broad pads. At the column’s top there was a similar, stubbier, pentadactyl arrangement, lumpy and uneven, and each finger of it ending in some reddish stone that gleamed where the light touched it. I had never seen anything about it: coming close I saw ice crusting its edges and angles. Then Watts’ voice grabbed my attention.

  “Chillet!” she exclaimed. “The spaces!” She was standing at the edge of the torchlight, reeling back from … nothing I could see. “There are doors here,” she choked. “Doors to … to everywhere. Can you feel them?” She stumbled forwards, arms outstretched like someone playing blind man’s buff.

  “There’s nothing!” I told her, but then Yon’s voice came to me, thick with phlegm. “It’s happening.”

  “What? What is?” I turned back to him.

  His face had finally lost its stony quality. The torchlight surprised real expression there: bitter, grieving. “Been working this job for … time, a long time. Was there ever anything else than the work? Had a family, didn’t I? Was a home, wasn’t there? So why can’t I remember them? Only the instructions and the work.” The tears running down his face were dark and oily.

  “Chillet!” Watts called again, and I looked round and saw her vanish. Before my eyes she just ceased to be there, stepping through an invisible gap into somewhere else entirely. Even as I cried out her name she was back again, staggering, her clothing stiff with frost. I ran over and dragged her back to the column, feeling her shiver uncontrollably. Her skin was blotchy with broken blood vessels and the whites of her eyes were red. I thought of Carnot and his portals. “The others will have to take their chances,” he had written, and I wondered just what awful distance from home they had all found themselves, for him to pen those words.

  “What happened?” I asked her, because I couldn’t make myself say, Where did you go?

  “The city…” she said, shuddering. “The stars…” She jumped up suddenly, then had to lean on me or fall. “The breeze, Chillet. I’ve seen where it’s going to.”

  “Workers,” slurred out Yon’s voice. “All we were.” He took another step towards the column, which had become the focus of his world. “The old lot went wrong, so they need us to fix it all, and then what?” His shout echoed about the chamber, and abruptly the breeze was strengthening, the air beginning to rush past us and tug at our clothes. My wide eyes raked the room but still there was nowhere that sucking wind could be going. Nowhere except that unseen nowhere which Watts had briefly vanished into. My ears were filled with the howling of the air through miles of passageways as it was ripped past us and into oblivion. I held onto Watts, and then we both clung to the column, the only fixed point we had.

  “Listen!” she shouted. “Do you hear it now?”

  And I did. Or it was the wind keening through ducts and vents and funnelling down to us there, but it seemed like flutes and pipes in complex interplay. It seemed like language.

  “Repairmen?” Yon demanded of the carven column, or of us, or the universe. “That’s all we are? What about when the repairs are done? When we’ve fixed the damage the others did? What about us?”

  Watts put her mouth to my ear and quoted, “The servants overthrew their masters and sit in their house.”

  And multiply and grow clever, I completed Carnot’s words in my head. “But what master? And Yon…”

  Under my touch, the frost-crusted surface of the column shifted, caked dust and ice cracking and sloughing from it. I looked up from where we crouched, and saw one of the carved clutches of vines convulse and then reach out, branching and branching fractally, flaking
away and crumbling even as it did so. That fluting sound – that voice – was clear now, shrieking over the wind.

  “You bastard!” Yon choked out. “You’re all the same!” His torch dropped to the ground and then skittered rapidly away from him on its way to infinity. Watts lunged for it and snagged its strap with a fingertip, just enough to haul it in and leave us its light. A moment later the ground shook, and I felt one of the column’s pedestal ridges ripple beneath me, throwing us both off.

  Watts turned the torch on Yon. He was staring at the column as it flexed and shuddered into animation after who knew how many aeons of slow contemplation and design. His expression was not one of fear or wonder but of the aggrieved working man exploited by his boss. His face was discoloured and flaccid; inky fluid ran from his nose and eyes and trailed in strings from the corners of his mouth. As we watched, some horrible dissolution took place within his chest so that the right half of him slumped and sagged without involving the left. His hands fumbled stickily, the fingers bending and squashing as he tried to light a final cigarette.

  With a gargle of grief and betrayal, Lewis Yon began to come apart. I saw him flowing, Carnot had written, and we saw the same: the piecemeal autolysis of the human form into a thick black ichor. His expression lasted longer than it had any right to, even when the component pieces of it were floating like froth on the bulging, oozing effluent into which he was breaking down.

  The column shifted and moved, the five toes of its base twisting and knotting at the floor for purchase, the lumpy head breaking free of the ceiling. The torchlight caught those gleaming red stones and they stared back at us from an unthinkable distance of space and time and species. One of the writhing dendritic clumps of tendrils that ringed its midsection reached out – not to us, but towards the collapsing thing that had been Yon.