The Song of the Underground

by Wendy Reakes

  “What do you want?” Heron mumbled.

  “I want you to help me get to Bedlam.”

  “Bedlam! Are you crazy, girl? No one goes to Bedlam except Cannes and his men.”

  “You can find it. You and those stupid friends of yours.”

  “You’re right. We can find anything. I am the master of find. You know that.”

  “Well then?”

  “I’m not going to Bedlam. It’s a shit hole.”

  “Have you been there before?”

  “Yes. I’ve been everywhere. You know that.”

  “So you can take me there. I can ride the rails as good as you and your friends.”

  He laughed. “There are no rails to Bedlam, stupid girl. You can only go by boat.”

  Wren’s eyes lit up. “By boat?”

  “Don’t get any ideas. The tunnels are narrow and there is hardly any head room and the rats will probably end up eating you.” Heron made claws of his hands to make her cower. But she did not. Rats didn’t scare her. Not anymore.

  “Why do you want to go there, anyway? It’s no place for a child.”

  Wren scowled at him. He was so conceited. He was just two years older than she. “My Mark has been taken there and I have to get him back.”

  “Who is this Mark?”

  “I found him at mother’s cemetery. We are in love.”

  Heron shook his head and sat up a little further against the headboard. “You brought an upsider to the city? Are you insane?”

  “Father is displeased, of course...but I can change his mind once I get Mark out of Bedlam.”

  Heron looked pensive. “Wait, I saw him. He was with a woman.”

  Wren jumped to her feet and stepped back. She regarded her brother as if he had lost his mind. “A woman? What do you mean? Speak now, brother, before I fight you with my claws.”

  I saw them last evening. A man called Buzzard and a woman...Croft...yes, that was her name. I ordered Cannes to take them to Bedlam...yes, I remember now.”

  Wren began to cry. The thought of Mark with another woman made her feel a sorrow she had never felt before. It must be love, if that is how much it hurt. She had to get him back. She had to get him away from the clutches of that woman, who would surely fall in love with him, as she had.

  She swiped her hand across her face to remove the tear trickling down her cheek. “Will you help me, brother? If you do not, I shall go alone. You know I will. I will.”

  Heron sunk back into the bed and threw the coverlet once more over his weary head. “Don’t be a fool. Father would never permit it.”

  Wren’s heart sank at the thought of going without her brother's help, and to go against her father’s wishes was worse. But go she must. She had to travel to Bedlam, alone, find her Mark and get him out of Sous Llyndum once and for all. And she was going with him.

  Chapter 51

  The Bird Catcher was leading them to the west of the city, through a tunnel entrance below a mammoth-sized rock face. The structure of the whole city was incredible. Byron told him Christopher Wren’s ingenious invention of the pneumatic drill was the one thing the founders could never have done without when they came underground to begin their new life. She said Wren had constructed the cathedral above their heads, closing them in for four hundred years where the city has evolved over time to the place it is today. Fascinating!

  They travelled on foot on a simple dirt track, but at the side of them was a single rail running along the ground, used, so Byron had explained, to transport produce, rather than people. It reminded Ben of the old Klondike mines where minerals were carried inside small wagons, pulled along, one after another.

  Tiny yellow lights were dotted along the walls, each one inside a cradle, like a glassless lantern. They were attached with cable at intervals, several meters apart, and they generated great interest from Ben. As he stopped, his attempt to tap one, to test if it was hot, was thwarted by the Bird Catcher who said, “You must not do that.” The colonel and his men had come to a halt, just as he’d pulled his hand away. The colonel in particular, looked momentarily irritated by the pause in their progress. Byron explained the lights were too hot to touch and that by doing so would result in a severe burn.

  Ben put his hand in his pocket. “Fascinating. What powers them?”

  “It is a mineral we sourced many years ago. I have been told it’s not unlike Scapolite, a mineral which can be found all around the world, but never on English soil. The only difference is that Scapolite is illuminated under ultra-violet light, this is not.”

  Ben’s instincts made him glance at the colonel just as the colonel averted his eyes to the ground.

  Byron was still talking. “There is a vein near Damnation. It runs for miles underground and we farm it for light. The only problem is the heat that is generated from it. It makes the tunnels hot to walk in, which is why we keep them very small in this part.”

  “But they must have another form of energy. They can’t just glow like that, it’s impossible.”

  The Bird Catcher seemed reluctant to explain further. But after she told them the reason, Ben understood why. The City of Sous Llyndum was tapped into the City of London’s power grid. It was connected, in the main, via the street lights, so that the extra surge from the additional power underground was not recognisable or easily detected. The truth of the matter was, if Sous Llyndum cut off their link to London’s supply, the City’s power surge would reduce so greatly that the upsiders would no doubt wonder why. As it was, the Llyns had enough power to use for their lights and for other small uses.

  “That’s ingenious.”

  She pouted. “You are not offended?”

  “Why would I be?”

  “We are stealing your energy. We have been doing so for nearly seventy years.”

  “Hey, that’s nothing. There’s thievery all over London, especially in the energy sector. I know! I’ve seen it firsthand. And what’s a little electricity among friends, eh?” Ben chuckled as he looked at the colonel who remained sour-faced. His men were standing behind him and under normal circumstances they would have looked a formidable crew. As it was, Ben decided they were as interested in Sous Llyndum as he was, and they were just as baffled.

  They continued walking. Byron was at his side and the colonel and his men were up ahead. He could tell they were talking to one another, but because they were looking straight ahead, Ben had no doubt they were attempting to disguise their intercourse.

  “These are the same lights you have dotted around the city,” Ben remarked. “I noticed them this morning.”

  She nodded as she glided along. She was just a couple of inches shorter than him. “Yes, we use the lights to give the impression of daylight and then after the rains come, we use candle light. Our ancestors found out the hard way how important it is to differentiate between night and day. At the beginning, some of the people went crazy and ended up in Bedlam.”

  “Bedlam? That is where you have sent the Americ...”

  She stopped him. “We are here.”

  Ben halted. In front of him, branching off from the area where they now stood, were round tunnels the size of the ones used for the trains underground. The central area resembled a factory floor. It was about the size of half a football pitch, housing thirty or more rail carts sitting empty of produce. Along the cave-like walls were giant vats; lead containers with small doors, bolted twice. They were about twenty-feet high, battered and black with age. Some were churning out steam while the rest, on the other side of the area, remained empty and devoid of any type of working mechanism. On one, the door had been left open and Ben saw that the inside was lined with copper. Gleaming copper.

  The smell was a mixture of aromas, which to Ben resembled a canteen kitchen, albeit he’d also picked up a scent of hops or something similar. In front of him were six tunnels, each with a single rail running through them and connecting to the dock of trolleys lined along the wall in the central area, and just inside each one was a giant w
ooden door, sealing off whatever was inside.

  “This is incredible...but how is this even here, how could you have constructed..?”

  Byron spoke. She seemed nonchalant but proud at the same time. And proud she should have been, Ben thought, considering the magnitude of such a landscape.

  “The tunnels were constructed in the seventeenth century by our forefathers,” she said. “Our one great leader, Christopher Wren, invented the pneumatic drill. Did you know that?”

  Ben shook his head. “I thought he was just an architect. He designed St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

  “That is correct, but he had many other lesser known talents. He considered the pneumatic drill to be one of his greatest personal achievements.”

  Ben saw the colonel and his men walking about the area, mingling with the Llyns who were labouring over their specific tasks. He only briefly wondered what they were talking about when the Bird Catcher continued with her tour guide slash history lesson dialogue.

  “The St. Paul’s Cathedral project took many years to complete,” she said. “The designs were altered many times and it was only after Christopher Wren included the great dome, that the plans were finally approved by the Royal Society. Wren incorporated a means of underground travel for the construction of the cathedral and other buildings, so that materials could be efficiently brought to site from great distances. However, as the first tunnel was started, it became apparent that the task would take too long, with much disturbance to the city, which was already in the process of being rebuilt after the great fire of London.”

  Byron paused and rotated the heel of her boot in the dirt floor. She continued her account as Ben listened and watched the activity about him. “It was then, Wren offered the unwanted, half-constructed tunnels to the evacuees, so they could live in a self-sufficient manner underground. More tunnels were added over the years, built by our people to create room for manufacturing food produce. That is our history.”

  “Fascinating,” Ben repeated.

  “Yes,” Byron answered.

  “But why don’t we know about this, there is no mention...”

  “It could never have been common knowledge. We would never have survived as long as we have. More would have come. We couldn’t have accommodated them. We have had some escapees...The infamous cat burglar, Charlie Peace, was one, until he went back up and got caught and hanged. He was a violin virtuoso, you know? He taught our people much about music, which was where our passion began.”

  Ben deliberated the implications of such an event and how the infamous went below ground to escape a worse fate in the real world. “You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if the phrase ‘going underground’, originated from here,” he said.

  She looked at him with a kind of indignation. “Of course it did.”

  Chapter 52

  Mark Buzzard awoke to the sound of the woman, somewhere along the corridor, wailing in that hell hole they called Bedlam. He and Charlotte had slept in restless stages, dozing on and off and waking to the strange sounds around them: doors banging, metal rails rattling, trains passing by, voices yelling and screaming. They had clung to each other, not as lovers would, but as a comfort for each other’s worst fears and nightmares. They had lain upon the slatted cot and snuggled up to one another, both of them with their fear-filled eyes opening and closing as the night wore on. Mark couldn’t remember how many times Charlotte moved her head and murmured, “What was that?” Eventually she stopped asking, even though the noises persisted. She simply realised he had no answers; he had no idea what that was.

  They had both taken a pee. It was humiliating for Charlotte and, if the truth be known, for him too. Each of them had turned their backs as the other went in the corner where the uncapped pipe jutted out of the ground, but the humiliation came from the noise of their flow as they both emptied their completely full bladders.

  Mark contemplated how, even though the two of them had just met, they had both within hours of meeting shared intimacies they would never have shared with anyone of the opposite sex in the best of situations. It was a form of coping, he guessed.

  In the middle of the night, as they laid with their legs entwined and their arms around each other’s trembling bodies, a rattling of keys made them both jump to their feet. Mark had had a momentary glimpse of hope, as the thought of salvation entering the room came upon him.

  It was not to be. The cell door was opened by an old man in ragged garb with a grey beard as long as the tunic he wore over his trousers. He was entering their cell with a tray of food. He slid it onto the floor and within seconds he had removed himself and locked the door behind him. Charlotte went to the tray and picked it up. She placed it upon the bed and she and Mark both regarded it. There was no way they would not eat it, even if it was just in protest for their predicament. They were upsiders after all. Not crazy people who belonged in a lunatic asylum.

  The tray held a metal plate with something that looked like thick naam bread upon it. Next to that was a type of dried fish and in a tiny pot was a spoonful of honey. A jug of water and two cups filled the tray and, as they poured it, they were surprised to see how clear and refreshing it looked.

  Mark broke a piece of the bread and put it in his mouth as Charlotte watched. He chewed and then nodded, encouraging Charlotte to try some. The fish was tasty, too, and as Charlotte dipped a piece of her bread into the honey and put it in her mouth, she and Mark began to laugh, unable to stop. There was no light to engage their eyes, just aching jaws and burning throats.

  When the old man returned later, they were ready for him.

  Mark stepped towards the bars, threatening him with all manner of consequences. Charlotte joined in, saying she was from the press and that she intended to use the weight of her position to ensure everyone in that place was put behind bars for illegally incarcerating two innocent people. The old man was unperturbed. He made a motion for them to step back into the cell, away from the bars, so that he could unlock the door and remove the tray. “If you don’t want to get fed to the birds,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon,” Charlotte murmured with indignation, as Mark pondered the thought of how much influence her high standing in the media would have on their situation underground. “Fed to the birds. You are joking.”

  The old man shook his head and indicated for them to move closer to the bars. He pointed to an area to the left of their cell, but as they strained their necks, out of curiosity rather than responding to his instructions, they couldn’t see anything. The man walked a few paces away from them and picked up a lantern from which a long thick candle glowed well enough to light up the corridor. They could see another cell opposite, but it had a dirt floor covered with something that resembled droppings. Then, as a movement alerted their vision to adjust to the light, both of them screamed as they caught the eyes and the wings of a giant bird, a bird chewing on a string of meat.

  “Vultures.” Mark said, “Vultures.”

  Charlotte grabbed hold of Mark's hand and walked slowly backwards into the cell. The old man chuckled and put his key into the lock and turned it. Keeping his eyes on the retreating twosome, he dragged the tray across the floor with his foot.

  As he walked away, with the sound of his hollow laughter reverberating around their ears, Mark spoke without moving a muscle. “We need to get out of here,” he said.

  Charlotte didn’t say a word. She simply nodded, and nodded and nodded...

  Chapter 53

  The colonel was becoming impatient, but he knew he had to suffer in silence as the tour got underway. He had been grateful for the opportunity to go further into the bowels of the city, since the information had been extremely informative, however, the details being offered to Mason about the history of Sous Llyndum and their food production was grating on his nerves. That was the part he had no interest in and he wished Byron would get on with things. Yes, he had seen enough of Sous Llyndum to last a lifetime, and if it wasn’t for the fact his blood pressure was always
diagnosed as perfect, he’d think it was that, which was making him feel hot under the collar.

  He ran his fingers around the edge of his shirt where his sweat had infiltrated the top of it with a triangle of dark colour. He’d already removed his jacket. He’d forgotten how bloody hot it got down here, otherwise he wouldn’t have brought it. Naturally, being the great leader he was, one who put the safety and welfare of his team first, he’d allowed his men to remove theirs. They were wearing military green with their dog tags tucked in, of course. His normally strict dress code was always relaxed in the underground city. It was all strategic.

  The colonel believed it allowed them to blend in more, making them more amiable towards the locals so that they developed some trust and lowered their guard.