The Song of the Underground

by Wendy Reakes

  The colonel bowed his head in response to her announcement. “Prime Minister.”

  She proffered her hand as Ben and the soldier at his side sat down.

  When Alice Burton took her own seat, she leaned forward to rest her elbows on the desk and her chin on her intertwined fingers. She was wearing a formal suit with a white stiff-collared blouse, unbuttoned to just above her large rounded breasts, straining against the cotton. She was renowned for never wearing slacks. She was once quoted as saying ‘I am a female leader in a man’s seat. I do not need to look like one’.

  Barnes leaned to one side to open a briefcase resting against the leg of his chair. He pulled out a file and placed it in front of her on the desk and then he finally sat down. The whole sitting, standing routine made Ben wonder if there was a battle of wits going on. He doubted he was far wrong.

  “The report you requested, Prime Minister,” the colonel said. It was a direct comment to the PM, clearly leaving Ben on the periphery.

  She picked up on it. She glanced at Ben and then the colonel with those penetrating confident eyes of hers. “I want you both working on this.” She flicked open the file, and before the cover hit the desk, Ben saw Highly classified on the front.

  “Working on what exactly?” Ben asked.

  “We call it the Sous Lyndum project.”

  At his side, Barnes pulled together the lapels of his jacket. He was in the Jellelabad’s uniform of a red coat over red and black trousers. “It’s a subterranean city beneath London,” he offered, with nonchalant rising and falling brows.

  A city beneath.... “You’ve got to be joking.” The response burst from his mouth before he could check it.

  Alice Burton nodded her approval. “I remember my reaction when I first heard about it. And that wasn't until after I took office.” She passed him a sealed letter. “Your official orders.”

  He didn’t open it. He knew she didn’t expect him to. He slipped it into his inside jacket pocket.

  Geoffrey Barnes was getting impatient. Ben detested the man. He always had. They had been introduced at an official function over a year ago, but they had never worked together before. He thought he was arrogant when he first met him and he didn’t think that opinion would change any time soon. The colonel spoke without looking at Ben, which just proved his point. “Sous Llyndum is a subterranean city below London. Llyndum is a Latin term meaning London. And if you speak French, as I believe you do, you’ll know that Sous means under. Under London. Comprends?” He was looking at him now.

  “That’s impossible.” It had to be.

  “No it’s not.” Alice Burton inferred. She’d clearly had that conversation before. “It was created in 1666, after the Great Fire of London. Sixty-three thousand people were made homeless after the fire. Some moved to the outskirts of the city, others moved to other parts of England, but the extremely poor had nowhere to go.”

  Ben looked at the colonel as he brushed a fleck of something off his sleeve. He seemed nonchalant when he confirmed her the PM’s version of events “The Royal Society, at the time, consisted of people like Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton,” he said. “They provided the homeless with the means to go below ground. In fact Christopher Wren built St. Paul’s Cathedral right over their heads, so that their world would remain a guarded secret.”

  “But it’s incredible. I had no idea.” How could they have kept it a secret for so long? He looked directly at Alice Burton. “How many live down there?”

  “About three-and-half thousand,” she answered.

  He looked at Barnes for confirmation. The colonel didn’t offer any.

  It was a fascinating subject. Ben didn’t know where to begin with all the questions rattling around his head. “But, how do they live? Why don’t they come above ground now? Surely they’re free to do as they choose.”

  Alice Burton stood up and went to the drinks cabinet in the right hand corner behind her desk. She picked up a crystal decanter and poured three shots of whiskey into three crystal glasses. She added one more shot to the one at the back. She left it on top of the cabinet and brought the other two with her, handing one to the colonel and the other to Ben. The colonel didn’t hesitate, and took his with a gracious nod of the head. He held it in his hand resting on his knee, while Ben accepted the other, albeit reluctantly. He didn’t want Barnes to think of him as an unsociable wimp.

  She took her own drink and sipped it before she sat down. Ben picked up on it. If she needed a drink that bad, she was nervous about the discussion. “They can’t come up. They’ve evolved down there. Living in the dark is as natural to them as living in daylight is for us.” The colonel allowed him to digest that, before he carried on. “Their eyes are different from ours. They can more-or-less see everything in the dark. And their skin is sensitive to sunlight, which is the main reason why they can’t leave Sous Llyndum.”

  “The main reason?”

  The PM answered with her eyes lowered. Her response had changed and Ben wondered why. “There are other issues, like surviving in our society. They wouldn’t know how.”

  “It’s remarkable.”

  “Yes, but it’s not so remarkable when you consider the logistics of the thing. Where else would the poor have gone after the great fire? Has anyone ever asked themselves that question? And to come back up to the real world...even that would have been out of the question, especially since the Royal Society provided everything for their survival. They were richer then than they had ever been. They even had proper sewerage. They didn’t have that before the fire destroyed London.”

  Ben thought Alice Burton sounded as if they should have been grateful. He guessed they would have been, considering the circumstance.

  “So, gentlemen, you must now be aware that the Sous Llyndum project is top priority. Rest assured, you have my utmost support in making sure everything goes smoothly. You get the job done and I’ve got your back. Does that sound good?”

  Neither of them offered a word of affirmation. Ben coughed. “And what is the plan exactly?”

  Alice Burton leaned back in her chair. The sun was shining into the office through the window behind her. “Before I explain, you must understand, Ben, this has everything to do with our housing policy. Our constituents will expect results.”

  “Okay.” He positioned his lips into an exaggerated pout. He did that a lot.

  The colonel picked up a tube of architect drawings from the side of his chair and unrolled them on the PM's desk. There, all mapped out on a massive ground plan were sketches of buildings, shopping malls, parks and roads.

  Alice rested her arm on top of them. “As you know, we have a serious overcrowding issue in the capital, Ben. So, we've decided to take the land underground and use it for increased housing and business space.” She pointed to the drawings as if she knew every detail inside out. “As you can see, it's going to be very upmarket: apartments, private swimming pools, exclusive shops, restaurants. We can pretty much guarantee the property down there will be highly sought after.”

  “With respect, Prime Minister, why haven't I been involved in this project? This is the first...”

  “We had to keep it classified, Ben. We can't afford this to get out. It could cause us many problems.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs Burton, but the last time I looked, my title was Minister of Planning and Construction. You appointed me yourself. Surely, in normal circumstances I would have been brought in on this from the beginning.”

  “Yes, of course, but...”

  Barnes interrupted her and she was glad of it. Ben could tell by the expression of relief on her face. “We couldn't guarantee that wife of yours would keep the lid on it.”

  Charlotte! He turned his head towards the colonel. If they weren’t in number ten, he’d have grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. “I never discuss confidential business with my wife. I never have.”

  The hairs on the back of his neck were bristling before Alice Burton tried dousing the flames. “Of course n
ot, Ben. It's just that...”

  The colonel treated the matter with disrespectful contempt. “It's highly sensitive. We couldn't risk...”

  “We?” Ben gasped at the relevance of the Prime minister in cahoots with the colonel. The thought of it was practically obscene. “Ma’am, since when is the colonel party to government business if it's so sensitive?”

  Barnes was relentless. “Because I haven't got a big mouth left-wing columnist for a wife.”

  “Excuse me?” Ben wanted to punch his lights out.

  “Gentlemen. The plans are in place. You must work together on this. Ben, everything will become clear, as we discuss our strategy. Trust me! Geoffrey, you can inform Ben about the Sous Llyndum project on the way.”

  Ben wasn’t about to be silenced. He’d just about had enough of this cat and mouse game. “On the way where?”

  The colonel smiled. “Sous Llyndum.”

  Chapter 3

  When she was out of sight of the stranger from America, Wren rushed towards the crypts lining the Avenue of Death. She pulled out a key from a pocket sewn into the seam of her dress. The key was large and cumbersome, but she held it in her small hands like a lifeline.

  Unlocking the decaying wooden door, she thought about the man she had just met and how he had looked at her. She wasn’t a stranger to glances like that. She’d noticed the way men scrutinized her figure when they thought she wasn’t looking. But he, the stranger from above, seemed different than anyone she had ever met. He was handsome, in a rugged sort of way, not unlike the men who lived in her world, but he had a colour to his face that was brown tinged with pink. She couldn’t decide if she liked that or not. She was familiar only with the whiteness of people’s skin, rather than a colour so dark. Not including Amos, the man in her city whose skin was as black as night. Perhaps Mark Buzzard was foreign. He’dspoken with a strange accent. Yes, that must be it. He was a stranger to England and it was probably the hot sun across the sea that had coloured him up.

  Inside the crypt, Wren pushed all her weight against the door. It groaned as it moved and as it finally secured itself into its aged frame, she was left in darkness, until her eyes became used to the non-light. Going towards the back of the crypt, she walked past three rotten shelves, holding coffins, old and decayed, collapsed inwards so that crumbling dust, holding the shape of bones, was visible beneath. At the back, her hand found a loose brick in the wall. She pulled it out and put her other hand into the cavity. There was an iron ring, which she turned to reveal a heavy stone entrance, shifting cobwebs and dust as it creaked open on absent hinges. Her father had brought her there when she was young, but since she had turned eighteen, she came alone to visit her mother, now at rest in the crypt alongside the bones of the woman buried beneath the sleeping angel.

  Just like all the other times she had been to the cemetery, she returned the brick to its place in the wall and then slipped inside the portal. It closed behind her, leaving the dead once more alone and at peace.

  Wren picked up her skirts, so that she could run along the passage unhindered. The hem of her dress became soaked where rainwater had spilled from the earth above and fallen to stagnant puddles on the walkway. She came to the end where an old iron gate had been covered by a panel of partition wood on the other side. She released a hidden latch and went through to a tunnel with a vaulted ceiling and round sides made of perfect square bricks and crackled cream-colored tiles. On the other side she saw the familiar underground station, deserted now, built by the Victorians to transport their dead from London to Highgate. A small dilapidated shop sat on the crumbling platform with a rusted metal sign in its glassless window advertising tobacco and confectionary.

  Wren jumped over the broken tracks to another manmade tunnel on the other side of the station and to a wall of brick, which had been punched through by ancient travelers. She put her leg inside as she held onto the side of the wall, feeling the wetness of her skirts as they chilled her ankles. Her chest was heaving from the exertion of her run and for a moment she stopped, just to draw a momentary breath. She pulled herself up and into the darkness of the narrow walkway, where she traveled at speed until she reached another door.

  There, she pushed the hair away from her face and peered through the doorway into the darkness beyond. She stepped backwards again and put her ear against the cold bricks. A screeching noise and a surge of wind blasted past the doorway where she hid from sight, and windows of lights flashed by with the undistinguishable faces of people traveling the tube; all of them oblivious to the girl in the long brown dress hidden in the shadows.

  As the noise abated and the tunnel once more became dark, Wren bent down and picked up the board she had hidden behind the door when she’d arrived earlier that evening. The rail-board had belonged to her mother, but it was hers now, since her father had presented it to her on her eighteenth birthday. He'd told her it had been painted by James Whistler himself when the artist came underground for a short time with Oscar Wilde many years before. It had a glossy background of ebony, with birds of paradise painted atop it in the boldest colours anyone had ever seen on a rail board. It was curved at each end, light enough to carry, but strong enough to hold a person...and sometimes two. Underneath, her mother’s name, Rosella, was scribed between two metal grips, forward and back, oiled to perfection.

  Wren put the board down on one of the tracks and pulled out a metal rod, which she hooked over the live inner rail. She took care to touch only the transparent rubber coating covering the board, lest she be electrocuted as soon as she stepped upon it. As it slotted into place over the rail, she quickly jumped on before it took off, speeding along with her hair flying behind her and the flesh of her face moving like shifting white sand.

  With her knees bent and her hands gripping the front, keeping her eyes lowered, Wren thought about her stranger, Mark Buzzard, and wondered if she’d ever see him again. Remembering his awkwardness when they’d met, she smiled to herself as she rode the rails back to her home underground, to the subterranean city beneath London called Sous Llyndum.

  Chapter 4

  Mark took the tube back to the West End. He spent the whole journey thinking about the girl he’d just met, the beautiful girl called Wren. He stared through the blackened windows as the tube raced across the city, not seeing his own reflection, but lost in a dreamlike state as he recounted his steps through Highgate Cemetery. He hadn’t once considered the possibility that he’d seen a ghost, not until the train pulled into Charring Cross station and he was jolted out of his stupor with the realization that what had just happened, may never have happened at all. He prayed it wasn’t a dream. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing the vision of her to some alter-reality. It would mean not seeing her again. An unacceptable proposition!

  As soon as he arrived at his hotel in Covent Garden, he searched for Bernie. Mark found him in the bar, perched on a stool and leaning on the polished counter talking to the bartender.

  “Well if it isn’t Mr. Buzzard.”

  Mark offered a playful shove. “Let me buy you a drink.” He made a circle in the air with his index finger as he ordered two beers.

  “Cheers.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Bernie was less animated now, but judging by the strong small of soap and after shave, Mark deduced he had just arrived at the bar from his hotel room and hadn’t yet started on the chasers.

  “Did you go up to Highgate?”

  “Sure did.”

  “So? What did you think of it?”

  Mark pulled up a stool just as the barman placed two pints of lager on the counter. The condensation on the glass made him feel parched. Mark raised his glass. “Bottoms up.” That was just one of the British phrases he’d picked up since he started his vacation.

  “Cheerio!” Bernie took a conservative sip of his drink, while Mark raised his own glass and drained half the contents. He gasped and placed the pint back down on the coaster.

  “Considering how quickly you
downed that drink, I guess Highgate freaked you out.”

  Mark shook his head. “No way! I’ve just worked up a thirst, that’s all.”

  Bernie offered a wink to the barman. “Did you see the Karl Marx monument?”

  Mark wasn’t sure how much he should tell Bernie about his encounter with Wren. “Eh, no, actually, I missed it.”

  “How d’ya manage that?”

  “I got talking to someone. A girl.”

  He responded with a snorting guffaw. “Ah, I see. It wasn’t Marx’s bust you were interested in.”

  He heard a chuckle from behind the bar. Mark shook his head as he took another sip of his drink. “It wasn’t like that. I just came across her while I was walking through the graveyard. She was on her own.”