The Song of the Underground

by Wendy Reakes

  “Um, excuse me! I would never have allowed you to stop me. We’re in this together remember.”

  “Yes, but we’re trying to save lives here, not endanger them.” Mark took the plank from her and began gouging out more and more decayed grouting.

  They had already punched a small hole in the bricks. It was big enough for him to put his arm through, but as he reached, his hand met another wall on the other side. His spirit was deflated for a moment, but Charlotte urged him to carry on. “We have no choice...would you rather spend time here, only to be killed?”

  “What about Wren?” He sat exhausted on the side of the bed. “If we manage to punch through the wall, I still can't go and leave her.”

  Charlotte was adamant and very persuasive. “I have very influential friends, believe me. We can get her out. I’ll take care of it.”

  “And your mission...What about that?”

  She shrugged. “They’ll have to find someone else to do their dirty work. God only knows why they chose me anyhow.”

  Mark used his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his brow. His breathing was heavy. It was so darned hot. “What is your mission? You may as well tell me. We have slept together after all.”

  She chuckled. “The Prime Minister sent me.”

  “Right. Okay, so don’t tell me. Whatever!” He was about to pick up the plank to begin again when Charlotte rushed to assure him that she had indeed been sent by the Prime Minister to deliver a message to her husband, Ben Mason.

  “Ben was sent underground with some military people to negotiate a deal with the king,” Charlotte rushed. Her eyebrows were raised and she was shaking her head. Mark suddenly realised she was just as baffled by the whole business as he was. And baffled didn’t even begin to describe how he really felt. There he was in an underground cell of a mad house, somewhere in London, and if he hadn’t have met Wren at Highgate cemetery, he’d now be landing at Kennedy. Home. With water and proper food and an ice cold beer...

  It was just at that moment they heard a noise and both jumped onto the bed.

  Charlotte cuddled up to Mark’s back as he pretended to snore. He opened his eyes just a little to see a shadow coming down the corridor outside. Then, as a light came shining into the darkness of their cell, illuminating the sleeping pair in each other’s embrace, he heard a familiar muffled scream.

  “Eearghhhh.” He could tell by her sweet voice it was Wren.

  Mark jumped up from the bed and rushed towards the bars of the cell. “Wren, what are you doing here? Are you alone? How did you get here? Are you all right? What...”

  “Who is that woman, Mark?” Her voice was just a whisper, as if she was terrified.

  “What..?” Mark swung about and watched Charlotte climb off the bed to place her feet on the floor. She averted her eyes from the light shining through and she was silent as she began to scrape the dirt off her hands.

  “Wren, darling. This is Charlotte Croft. She was captured and brought to Bedlam the same time as me.”

  “But you were...on the bed, I...I saw you.” She sounded like a little girl, lost in a crowd.

  “Wren, honey, listen to me. What you think you saw isn’t how it is, okay? Charlotte and I have been trying to get out of here. She has to deliver a message to her husband and you and I have to go upside if we have any hope of staying together.” He watched her eyes soften. There were tears in them, glistening in the light of the candle she held aloft. She put her hand through the bars and he held it and kissed it. She had the sweetest fingers.

  He heard Charlotte come up behind him. “Mark...” she said. “We have to get out of here.”

  Mark turned back to Wren. “Can you get us out, honey? Can you?”

  She nodded. “I think so. I have to get the keys. It won’t be difficult. Wait here,” she was about to leave when she turned back and put her face close up to his, in-between the bars of the cell. “You have to tell me, Mark. Is it me you love or...her...tell me.”

  Mark sighed and shook her head. “You, baby. Just you!”

  She left then, going back down the corridor. Charlotte gave Mark a nudge on the arm. “You may not want to joke about us sleeping together...might not go down too well.

  Mark nodded. “Understood.” He couldn’t agree more.

  Chapter 62

  The group alighted from the tunnel and they were once more back inside the city. Ben was relieved. After his encounter with the bees, and bearing the humidity of the other tunnels, he wouldn’t care if he never went back there again. The Bird Catcher assured him he needn’t return, that in fact, all the other parts of the city he would be interested in touring, would have nothing to do with food production. “You are hot. Would you care for refreshment?”

  She needn’t have asked. They were all parched, and any form of cold drink, right then, would have been very welcome. But it wasn’t that kind of refreshment she meant. She took them to an area to the rear of the palace, where she led them through an opening to a cave. Ben was reluctant to follow. He’d had enough of being cooped up in a confined space. He needed air.

  The entrance was low when they went in, making them duck their heads, but when they got through to the other side, the sight they saw there was worth every little bang on the head, as far as Ben Mason was concerned.

  Inside was a pool of water, big enough and inviting enough to cool the heels of a dozen people. The cave was lit by an array of candles set in long glass domes, which was just as well because the flame would surely have been extinguished by the force of the draught of cooling wind. The wind was blowing onto their faces like an autumn breeze and even though they had no idea how it could be, they were not about to argue.

  The pool had steam rising from it, but it rose only a meter above the water before the wind blew it away, making it look like moving clouds on a high-speed camera. The steam was blown through a crack in the cavern wall, about one foot thick and three meters high. After that, Ben had no idea where it went, but he was at a point where he no longer cared. His curiosity about the workings of Sous Llyndum was, just for an hour or more, put on hold. The only thing he cared about now was cooling off and rubbing the sticky sweat off his body and the lingering feeling of being covered in bees.

  So, as the Bird Catcher departed, and with no need for words or any kind, Ben, along with the colonel and his men, pulled off their boots, stripped off their clothes and jumped into the pool wearing just their underpants and socks.

  Chapter 63

  Wren returned with a key.

  “How...?” Mark was amazed at her resourcefulness.

  “I am the princess, Mark. They must obey me.” She acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It was to her.

  She put down the light and placed the key into the lock. For a moment, Mark wondered if she had the right one...it was all way too easy. The lock turned and the door swung open. Wren rushed in and flew into his arms. He kissed her hair, felt her soft body up against his. He turned her head and kissed her passionately, not just because he wanted to reassure her that she was the only woman for him, but because she’d stirred him and made him want to throw her to the floor and make love to her.

  He refrained, of course.

  They wasted no time after that. Wren took Mark’s hand and Mark took Charlotte’s and together they left the cell towards their avenue of escape.

  It was a boat. It was moored inside the confines of Bedlam. It reminded Mark of the moat in the Tower of London he had toured only a week before, with old worn slabs and a quayside to moor boats, used to transport ancient prisoners to their deaths.

  A woman’s scream pierced the night and a man stepped out of the darkness. It was the jail keeper, the one who had brought their food and threatened to feed them to the birds. The scream was from a woman locked inside one of the cells; she was at the door, her mad eyes staring through the bars.

  The old man paced towards him and as Wren and Charlotte stepped into the boat, Mark spread his feet apart and formed a stance
to fight him. But the jail keeper walked past. He kneeled down upon the edge of the dock and began to untie the boat as Wren started firing it up. Mark had expected a fight to the death and he was prepared for it. Instead the old man was letting them get away. Mark followed Charlotte into the boat and they began to move, chugging and hissing towards a bend in the underground tunnel.

  “Why did he let us get away like that?”

  Wren shrugged, “I am the princess.”

  Chapter 64

  After a brief repast and a ninety-minute siesta, the group was once again pacing through tunnels and caves. They were in the south of the city and, in Ben’s opinion, it wasn’t so pretty there. He could have sworn they were descending as they paced along and when Ben’s ears popped, that pretty much confirmed it.

  The Bird Catcher wasn’t with them. She’d told them she never went to the industrial part anymore; it was too hot for her. She had instructed them to wear jackets. Not to keep them warm, but to keep the heat from burning their skin. Ben didn’t like the sound of it, but he wasn’t about to admit that to the colonel who had clearly been there before. His close encounter with those dumb bees had already tarnished his macho image. He couldn’t afford yet another kick in the balls.

  “You’ve been down here before?”

  Barnes nodded. Sweat was pouring from his brow as it was on all of their faces. It was hot. Really hot! “In a minute we’ll take a left, which takes us into a cooling chamber. You can get your breath back there. In the meantime, stop talking and save your energy.” It was the smartest advice the colonel had ever given him.

  They passed workers en-route. They were dirty, appearing as if they had been brushed with black paint or as if they had stepped out of a coal mine. The dimly lit path, making a gradual descent, was broken only by occasional man-made steps. They were a relief on the calves as the gradient offered little else. Ben could smell sulphur, and something else he couldn’t recognise...no, wait! He could. It was the smell of burning rubber.

  They veered left. Ben was becoming disorientated. It was the heat...Then a roar blasted his eardrums like a pack of lions chewing his face. “What the f...?”

  Ahead was a cavern of natural springs shooting out of the ground with a thirty foot waterfall above them; dominating them, like a mother towering over her young, protecting them as they frolicked in a splash pool. A thin layer of water covered the sloping stone surface, falling away to the end over a cliff where a primitively constructed wheel turned and collected it.

  Ben watched the colonel and his soldiers pull off their shoes, remove their jackets and strip off their shirts and pants. He could see them screaming and whooping with glee as they jumped into the babbling springs. They were lapping up the coolness of the water, but Ben couldn’t hear them. Only the sound of the roaring cascade that was the waterfall filled his eardrums.

  He needed no instruction to follow suit. He smelled as if he had been smoking and as he tore off his jacket, he felt as if he was stepping out of an oven. He pulled off his shirt and quickly untied his laces, leaving his boots abandoned next to the others. He pounced on the spring nearest to him, where the joy he felt by the coolness of the water, made him want to weep.

  He sat on the surface with his back against the spring, as he looked in awe over the cliff where the water dropped off to a massive natural cavern where the Llyns had created their industry. Overhead, millennia old stalactites, formed in massive proportions, fell like twisted columns to the floor. The wonder of them made Ben consider their creation. He knew they were created by ground-water seeping through the ceiling roof, which meant that above them was a river…or the earth had shifted and had pushed the flow in a different way. He couldn’t be sure. That place down there often made him feel as if he was on a different planet. It gave the word ‘disorientated’ a whole new meaning.

  Looking upwards he could see the ceiling glittering. He didn’t know why. And to the left, the wall of the cavern was caged by rickety-looking scaffolding, where at intervals, looking like a catacomb, small caves had been dug out, mined from whatever they had discovered inside the rock.

  Apart from the wheel collecting the water, the rest of the blackened machinery was similar to the workings of an elaborate clock. There were walkways caging it, which carried Llyn workers going about their duties. It was ancient, he could see that, and as far as he could tell it was the pressure of the water that was keeping it churning

  The colonel came to sit next to him. He ran his hands over his face, and smiled. Ben was more interested in the strange machines churning and spitting out steam into manmade chimney stacks. The colonel had to shout to be heard. “They tap the steam and run it into the condensers in the city, where the rain comes from. Crazy, huh?”

  Ben sucked his bottom lip and nodded. He drank some of the water to quench his thirst.

  The colonel pointed into the distance, to the right. “See those seams over there?”

  Ben had to squint through the water trickling over his face, so that he could see into the distance. There, three diagonal stripes cut into the rock. They must have been about five meters apart, but they were each five meters wide and they ran from the top of the cavernous ceiling to the bottom, to a shallow lake.

  “That’s the Scapolite, or something similar; the glowing mineral they use for light.” He was shouting and smiling at the same time. “They have removed just a miniscule amount since they discovered the cavern two-hundred years ago. There’s enough there to illuminate London every day for the next five hundred years.” The colonel smiled. He was like a proud father.

  Ben watched him. “So this is what you’re after?”

  “We, Mason, we.” He laughed. “You don’t know the half of it. There are precious stones in those caves over there that will make your eyes water. They’re not as pure as the stones you’re thinking about, but nevertheless, they will have an extremely high market value.” Barnes looked as if he had everything worked out. “Not forgetting the rubber they manufacture. It’s an ingenious product. We will go there in a moment.” He pointed to the striped wall on the right. “That wall is about forty meters thick.” He patted Ben on his back. The action was way out of character. “Come on. I’ll show you the other side.”

  Chapter 65

  Mark, Charlotte and Wren were still travelling through the tunnel on the canal. The final hour of the journey was the most exhausting since they had run out of fuel before reaching their destination. The boat had come to a stop as the steam stopped churning from the funnels. Wren had explained that the fuel was oil that the Llyn’s produced from their well near Damnation. It was all new to Mark, but he wasn’t particularly surprised. The city was already an enigma and anything that was thrown at him at that point was, more-or-less, water off a duck’s back. Okay, maybe not as lax as that!

  Wren told them the fuel was sparked by a single motor, which when ignited, generated the contraption in the middle of the boat to pick up water and turn it into steam, thus enabling them to travel on a miniscule amount of oil. Too minuscule it would seem, because now the fuel had run out and they were stuck. Up the canal with no paddles!

  Mark came to the rescue. It seemed his tour of England would prove to be very useful, now that he was battling for survival in that underground world. He had visited Little Venice in London the week before, and had witnessed first-hand how the Victorians had propelled their barges. “They used a horse, walking along the towpath, to pull the barge along,” he told Wren and Charlotte, “but beneath the bridges and tunnels they moved like this...” That was when he moved to the highest point of the boat, just near the stacks in the middle, and slid onto his back. He put his legs in the air, and held on tightly. Then he pushed and strained until he got the momentum of walking on the ceiling. Charlotte offered to help, but her legs weren’t long enough to reach. Instead she used her hands to steer the boat away from the side walls as they continued downstream. It was a laborious task, but they were all very motivated.

  “Wha
t are we going to do when we get the other end, Mark?” Charlotte’s voice was strained as her arms pushed against the side.

  “That’s a good question.” He was equally breathless, speaking in broken syllables. “Maybe it’s time you told us the message the Prime Minister wants you to deliver to your husband.”

  “I suppose under the circumstances...The Prime Minister instructed me to tell Ben to abort.”

  “Abort what?” Mark asked.

  “I’m not sure. The Sous Llyndum project, I suppose,” she answered. “She confided in me that there were plans in place to put the city back into the hands of the English Government, so that they could provide new housing for the people of London. It was a scheme they’d implemented two years ago.” Charlotte’s breathing became strained as she talked and pushed against the walls at the same time. “It was one of Alice Burton’s policies; a solution to the overcrowding in the capital and a scheme that would apparently guarantee her another term in office.” She stopped and rested as she stroked the palms of her hands. “I guess the message is to instruct Ben that the plans will not be going ahead and that he should leave the underground city and accompany me back above ground.”