So Below: The Trilogy

by Matt Whyman

  The young Russian looks around. Even Jenks appears to be waiting for him to make the next move. “If you think I’m brave enough to stride up and hope they move aside, you’ll be disappointed. If we’re going to push on, we do it in style. And I think you know what I’m suggesting here.”

  Mae Lin claps her hands. “I do!” she squeals. “Make some magic, Mikhail. It’s about time you guys impressed me!”

  “Very well,” he says, “but I’ll need your help.”

  “How so?” she asks.

  Mikhail rolls his shoulders, as if limbering up for a performance. “Did you bring any food?” he asks. “I could really use something to eat.”

  Let’s say you’ve been raised in captivity. All of a sudden, some cheeky monkey with a set of keys unlocks your pen and invites you to high-tail it to freedom. What do you do? You run as fast as your four legs can carry you, of course. For an animal that often survives on leftovers, the streets of London are easy pickings. But come daybreak, the people who encounter you prowling around don’t seem so pleased by your presence.

  With a strong instinct for survival, your feral brothers and sisters go to ground as a pack. Slinking around in the tunnels down there, you find a bunch of caskets, and accidentally knock one to the floor as you sniff around. It cracks open, releasing a pungent odour that might repel humans but smells rather tasty to you. So, you drag out the contents and trot into the tunnel with it. Your brothers and sisters keep taking a bite, but come away with little more than strands of fabric stuck between their fangs. Still, you push on, hoping that there must be some bones at the heart of it. Finally, with hunger mounting, you engage in one big wrestling match for control of your prize. But just as you tear apart the very last strip, something very odd indeed commands your attention. A boy with red spiky hair, a shiny nose ring, and torches strapped to his temples has just appeared before you. He shows you his palms in turn, and also opens his sleeves as if to show he’s hiding nothing. Quite how the tasty-looking delicacy appears in his possession is beyond you, but you watch curiously as he wheels it from one hand to the next, before adding two, three, four and then five more morsels to the mix. You wouldn’t know it was dim sum, of course. Then again, no matter what rung of the food chain you’re on, it sure smells good. Before you know it, drool is slopping from your jaws to the floor of the riverbed.

  This juggling act is second to none. Kind of hypnotic, too. As a zoo animal, you’re used to watching members of the public fool around in front of your cage. Normally, you skulk about ignoring it. Much as you dislike the attention, you can hardly scare them away. When this one allows his food to go flying in all directions, however, every one of you seizes advantage of the fact that there are no bars to hold you back. You pounce, not for the boy but the food he’s just flung far and wide, and your brethren do the same. For it’s easier to devour a defenceless little dumpling than some screaming, kicking kid. That can wait for dessert, when there’s nothing else on offer.

  And yet, by the time you’ve each leapt upon such unexpected treats and wolfed them down, the boy behind them has vanished. He’s nowhere to be seen. Even the final bandage has disappeared. It leaves you with a strange taste in your mouth, and not just because you’re unused to such fine Chinese delicacies. Still, you’re a jackal. You’ll get over it. Which is why you gather as a pack and prowl back to the river mouth in search of easier pickings.

  23

  Call of the caged brute

  Some way upstream, beyond obstacles and challenges that Yoshi and his friend could never imagine, there stands a cage. It’s fashioned from iron, wood, bone and rope, and contains a bald-headed brute. The cage is cramped for such a big man. Aleister sits with his knees tucked to his chest, and one hand pressed to his forehead.

  Up ahead, whenever fires are lit in this section of abandoned tunnel, the desolation of his true confines becomes clear to him. For the riverbed here is scattered with boiled bones. The skeletal remains of pigs, to be precise. They crunch underfoot whenever one of the underground dwellers who have made this place their homes lopes out to work or play. There’s one now, carrying a flaming torch, which they often do to keep warm. With a big potbelly bulging through its butcher’s apron, it could be Jenks Junior after too many pork chops. Aleister has seen this one before. Indeed, it’s following a regular routine. As creatures of habit, he knows this troglodyte is on its way to tend to the swine that keep this tribe in meat and trotters.

  Watching the wretch lope along with his flame held high, Aleister waits for it to illuminate the far end of the tunnel. When it does, he catches just a glimpse of the chasm that cuts them off from the other side, and the waterfall beyond. There it is, plunging into the abyss in great veils of spray. The waterfall marks the end of the Walbrook’s journey. Through his tight blue eyes, it also serves as a reminder of what he has left behind. It’s just a fleeting view, however, for the troglodyte ducks into a bolthole in the tunnel that will take him to the herd he must muck out.

  The brute closes his eyes, and savours this reminder of home. With no day or night to track time, Aleister can only guess how long it’s been since he first crossed the divide. He had left instructions for Yoshi to destroy the pipe that allowed him to reach this side. With great reluctance, the boy and his psychic friends had carried out his request. Aleister smiles fondly to himself. Yoshi was a good kid at heart. He might’ve known how to bring out the worst in the brute back at the Foundation, but all that was behind him now. The same could be said for his ambition to control the Faerie Ring. With this in mind, Aleister lifts his brow and fixes his gaze on the tunnel roof. It’s too dark for him to see the seven-pointed star, etched into one of the bricks, but he knows exactly where to look. It means when his keeper shuffles out to feed him, brandishing a torch along with a bucket of slops, the waypoint is right there in his field of vision.

  It may be one of seven, each marked on the city surface by a Hawksmoor Church, but in the right hands this one could unlock the whole Faerie Ring. Discovering that the waypoint within the troglodyte’s lair was the key had come as a revelation to Aleister. Like Julius, his great rival for control of the ring, he had long believed that seven psychics were required to undertake such a task. Not for nothing had he established a programme at his Foundation in order to harness such a team.

  As it turned out, having risked everything to come here and connect with the waypoint himself, it seemed only one psychic possessed that ability: a blind wretch who belonged to this subterranean community, but who had been forced to flee, with Yoshi’s help, for the crime of being different to the others. Aleister sighs and sinks his head once more. Had he known, he might not have been so tempted to come back here and literally burn all his bridges in the process.

  “Mister Aleister, it’s feedin’ time again!” The wheezing voice comes out of the gloom, and then a figure slowly takes shape. This troglodyte sports bushy mutton chop whiskers and a thick silver band in one ear. He’s holding a stick that’s been pulled from a fire, still aflame at one end, and what passes as a meal on a plate.

  “Pork scratchings again?” The brute watches the troglodyte drive the end of the flaming stick into the ground, then reach for a set of keys that hangs from a nail in the tunnel wall.

  “Stay back,” he warns, before unlocking the cage. “’Else you’ll go hungry.”

  Aleister inspects the plate that appears in his lap. He knows his keeper won’t leave until he’s seen him eat at least a scrap, which is an ordeal in itself.

  “Don’t you get tired of always eating the same food?” he asks.

  The keeper secures the cage and squats in front of it. “Nope,” he wheezes, scratching at his belly. “Never did us no harm.”

  Aleister glances at this blind freak of nature, but decides not to argue. He picks at the offering before him, and forces himself to chew it down.

  “How much longer must you keep me like this?” he asks eventually. “You treat me like an animal!”

  “Not for
me to say,” replies his keeper with a shrug. “Only the Elder can decide what’s to be done with you.”

  Aleister quits chewing, almost choking as he does so. “The Elder? But he’s dead? I killed him with my bare hands.”

  The keeper observes him intently. Despite his sightless eyes, it’s clear his senses are working in other ways. “Did you see us cart his body to the back of beyond?”

  “The back of beyond? Where is that?”

  The keeper gestures into the darkness behind the brute. “Did you see us cart his body in that direction?” he repeats

  “No.”

  “Then he must have survived!” replies the keeper gleefully, almost taunting the brute now for his ignorance. “The only time anyone here is taken to the back of beyond is when we’re ready to be buried. The gate keepers see to that, and you won’t clap eyes on them unless there’s been a fatality. O’ course, you might get the odd foolish soul who wants to see what the world is like on the other side, but the Catcher takes care of them.” As he says this, he curls his hands into claws and pretends to swipe them at the brute.

  Unimpressed by what clearly sounds like an urban myth, Aleister turns to peer into the tunnel depths. As ever, it’s impossible for him to see anything beyond the reach of his keeper’s torch flame. “So where has the elder been all this time?” he asks, more concerned by news of his survival.

  “Resting.” The keeper swabs a finger into his ear, slurps at the dirty wax that comes out with it, and then rocks closer to the bars. “Between you and I, Mister Aleister, we’re sorry you didn’t finish the job. He’s a cruel and vengeful leader, see, and deep down we’re a peaceful tribe. Our forefathers founded this little paradise of ours to escape from a great fire, and we don’t want to lose it now. Through the generations, we’ve been taught that no good comes from fanning flames.”

  “Wise words,” the brute growls. “Someone always gets burned.”

  “If it were up to me,” the keeper continues, “I’d let you go so long as you promised never to come back or mention out existence to a soul in the world above. Unfortunately, the Elder don’t see things as I do. He’s back on his feet just this morning, in fact, and most anxious to see you. I don’t suppose it’ll be long now, Mister Aleister. I just can’t guarantee that it’ll be painless.”

  The brute slumps back in his cage, in no mood now to finish his meal. His keeper takes one look at the plate of scratchings, and dares to squeeze his hand through the bars to help himself.

  “Please leave me alone,” grumbles Aleister, and takes refuge in his thoughts once more.

  Aleister remembered the Elder well. He had found him glowering at the entrance to this very lair. This chief of the troglodyte tribe might have been in the winter of his years, but he’d swung the club at the brute with great force. Aleister had struggled to wrest it from his grasp, only to be dragged off and caged before he’d finished the job, it seemed.

  The brute closes his eyes, sensing the end is close at hand. It’s only when a voice drifts into his mind that he hauls himself upright in his cage.

  “Aleister? Can you hear me?”

  He looks around, seeing nothing in the darkness. Then he senses a presence all around him. He can’t see anything, but then he knows there’s nothing there. For this is a psychic connection - and there’s only one person who could be on the other end.

  “Yoshi? I sense you’re with me.”

  “Well, we’re on our way for real!”

  “You are?” Aleister considers what this means. “Be careful, boy.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” the voice replies. “I just wanted to let you know that you haven’t been forgotten!”

  “Is Jenks with you?” asks the brute, mindful not just of what the wretch can do with the waypoint, but what the Elder might do to him.

  His question is met with a silence. It lasts so long that Aleister is almost convinced that he’s been talking to himself. Finally, the boy replies, but not as the brute had hoped.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What is it? Yoshi, are you in trouble?”

  “Gotta go . . . ”

  24

  Hip deep in trouble

  Nobody had expected to encounter jackals on this journey. Mikhail’s deft distraction with the dim sum may have helped the party pass by unharmed; even so, it left one of their number distinctly unimpressed.

  “No offence,” Billy No-Beard tells him, as he rolls along the riverbed beside him, “but what you did back there was kind of lame.”

  The young Russian keeps his torch beams trained on the riverbed. “I tried my best,” he says through gritted teeth.

  “Yeah, but it was hardly street magic, was it? Juggling is more of a circus stunt.”

  “Nonsense.” This is Livia. She’s leading the way with Jenks loping along beside her, but has heard every word. “The way I see it, street magic is a mongrel mix of all kind of things. It’s a little illusion, some card magic and sleight of hand.”

  “You forgot to mention juggling,” says Billy. “Frankly I’m surprised Mikhail doesn’t just go the whole way and dress up like a clown.”

  “OK, that’s enough.” This time, Mikhail stops dead and glowers at the boy on roller blades. “Next time we face a problem, it’s your turn to deal with it.”

  “Fine,” replies Billy, a little stung. “Not a problem. At least then you’ll see some truly awesome conjuring.”

  Yoshi and the rest of the party follow behind. Yoshi swaps a glance with the twins and Mae Lin in turn, and then shakes his head at such squabbling.

  “Can we focus on getting there in one piece?” the boy asks. “I don’t care how we do it, so long as nobody gets hurt along the way.”

  His words serve to calm everyone, and for a while they continue their trek in silence. The party pass the wreckage of several tea crates, and crunch over bottle glass worn smooth from the time when water ran through here. There’s so much of it, in fact, that Mae Lin is moved to comment that it looks like the debris from an explosion in some physician’s laboratory. Every now and then, they hear the distant rumble of an underground train, or the muffled gurgle from an outflow pipe in a void beyond the tunnel walls. Such noises remind Yoshi that they’re in the very belly of the city. No matter how dark and desolate it is down here, he thinks to himself, they’re just feet from the heart of a bustling metropolis. He imagines how reassuring it would be to lift a manhole cover from the inside and take a peek at the outside world. Before his thoughts climb any higher and tempt him to take off to the rooftops for a jump running workout, Yoshi reminds himself that he has made a promise. Jenks continues to accompany Livia, with Mae Lin showing boundless energy now as she walks alongside them. He wonders how it must feel knowing that you’re so close to home, and wishes he could remember what that word meant to him.

  The thought lingers in Yoshi’s mind for some time. With all recollection of his life stopping short at the Foundation, he feels only frustration at this mental block. As the party continue to advance, Billy bringing up the rear, he senses tension building between his temples. The riverbed is becoming soft and sandy underfoot. Even Jenks begins to pick his way more carefully just in front of him. For the pressure in his head becomes overpowering all of a sudden. It causes him to pause for just a moment . . . and that’s when the flash goes off behind his eyes.

  At first he sees nothing but darkness. He could have been transported anywhere, he thinks to himself. Then, as the psychic energy that has helped to form this remote view begins to glow, he makes out the hulking figure in the cage ahead. His back is turned to him this time, but the sheer span of his shoulders and the folds in the nape of his bald dome are unmistakable.

  “Aleister?” The boy directs his remote view around the cage so he’s facing him directly. “Can you hear me?”

  The brute lifts his tight blue eyes at this. Somehow, Yoshi knows exactly what he’s going to say. The boy may not be there in body, but it’s clear that Aleister is aware of his p
resence. He nods when Yoshi assures him that they’re on their way, but then a note of concern comes into his expression when he asks if Jenks is among their number. Yoshi draws breath to question Aleister about it, only for a startled shout and a scream to drag his attention back to his immediate surroundings.

  “Uh-oh.”

  What Yoshi witnesses, directly in front of him and with his own eyes, is enough to halt this remote view prematurely. Signing off abruptly, he blinks for focus and then rushes towards the cause of the commotion.

  “Stop!” Livia yells at him. “Don’t come any closer!”

  “Stay right where you are!” Mikhail calls out, his urgent warning echoed by Mae Lin and the twins.

  Startled and confused, Yoshi digs in his heels and then back tracks from what feels like sponge. He senses Billy pull up right beside him, with Jenks at his coat-tails now. Together, the trio look on aghast at the calamity that has overcome his friends. For, without warning, the party have walked right into quicksand.

  “I’m sinking!” This is Mikhail, up to his waist now.

  Mae Lin struggles to turn around, only to find herself floundering. Yoshi stares at the treacherous surface of this stretch of riverbed. He notices a crescent line running across it, just in front of his feet, beyond which there are no stones, rubble or treasures. It’s as smooth as wet cement, with about the same consistency.

  “Don’t move a muscle!” Yoshi says in a bid to stop them from struggling. “Remain as still as you can. We’ll get you out. Don’t worry!”

  The twins turn to one another, up to their armpits now.

  “What do you suggest?” Blaize asks.

  “It’s no good,” her sister gasps, struggling to stop herself from sinking further. “Help us!”

  Mikhail twists around to face Billy. “Do something!” he begs. “Hurry!”

  Billy is in shock. He moves his mouth but no words follow. Finally, he stirs and shoots the ruffled cuffs of his shirt. “OK,” he says. “It’s a long shot, but here goes.” Without a moment to hesitate, he produces one end of a length of rope from the pocket of his waistcoat. Hand over hand he continues to pull it out, as if somehow he’s conjuring it from thin air. It coils at his feet, until finally he reaches the far end, which he holds out for everyone to see. “Observe,” he says simply, only to be cut short by a young Russian whose face and red-spiked head of hair is about all that’s visible of him in the quicksand.