Darkside

by Tom Becker

  Two long hours later he had learnt nothing. There didn’t seem to be any common theme to the books in Alain’s study. It was as if he’d gathered a hundred random volumes and put them on his shelves. Old history books, political textbooks, poetry books and even a selection of personal diaries. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were deathly boring. In some of them Alain had placed bookmarks at certain pages, and circled or underlined specific passages. For example, in Eminence: My Life with Professor Carl von Hagen, a diary by a serving maid called Lily Lamont, the following section had been highlighted:

  19th October, 1925: After the hubbub and excitement of the past few days, my master was quiet today. He spent the day locked up in his laboratory, refusing all my offers of food and drink. Towards the evening he appeared, with a wild and ferocious look in his eyes. He mentioned something about the “darkest side” underneath his breath, before picking up his hat and greatcoat and stepping out into the night. I was not to see him for several days afterwards.

  Which was slightly more interesting, but Jonathan didn’t have the foggiest what it meant. Nor could he decipher the importance of a slender book called The Criminal Underbelly of Victorian Britain, which was crammed with bookmarks. According to the date on its inside cover, it was written by a man called Jacob Entwistle way back in 1891, making him wonder what the point was in reading it. Nevertheless, on page seventy-nine Alain had marked the following passage:

  In the foul depths of Pentonville Gaol I came across a particularly wretched specimen called Robert Torbury, a pickpocket and petty thief. He had been languishing behind bars for many years, and his mind had wasted away as a consequence. When he laid his eyes upon me he grabbed at my clothing, imploring me to help him. He was being sent away, he gabbled nonsensically at me, he had been sentenced to live in the darkness. As he sobbed I wondered what sane man could listen to him and still maintain that the legal system of the British Empire remains the fairest in the civilized world. . .

  Jonathan closed the book with a thump, raising a cloud of dust. This was getting him nowhere. He turned his attention to the scraps of paper on the floor. They were covered in the scrambled thoughts that Alain had managed to scribble down. Luckily most of them were dated, so in about ten minutes Jonathan was able to put them in some sort of chronological order. The most recent entry had been made the day before his dad had suffered a darkening. It read simply: “A crossing? Surely I must be close now”.

  Beneath it there was the name of a book – The Darkest Descent – and a page number, with a code after it that he realized was a library reference number. Jonathan felt a little tremor of excitement. Could this book have something to do with whatever dark secret had been haunting Alain for all these years? He couldn’t be sure, but he knew one thing – he had to get his hands on that book. And there was only one place in London where he would be able to find it.

  5

  The carriage of the Northern Line tube rattled furiously as it made its hidden progress underneath the streets and houses of London. Above the surface it was fresh and overcast, but down in the tunnels the air was stiflingly hot and the strip lighting hurt Jonathan’s eyes. Although it was mid-morning, and all the commuters had long since reached their offices, the carriage was still jammed with people, and his face was in an uncomfortable proximity to an overweight tourist’s armpit. Jonathan glanced up at the tube map on the wall of the carriage, to count how many stops he had to go until he could escape the arid prison.

  The piece of paper he had taken from Alain’s study was folded safely into his jeans’ pocket. From time to time he slipped his fingers into the pocket to reassure himself that it was still there. The instant he had read it he had realized where he had to go. Jonathan knew his father well enough to know that he would not be able to pick up The Darkest Descent at his local library. It would not be sitting alongside cheap murder mysteries and romance novels. More than likely, Alain had been the only person who had ever wanted to read the book. No, there was only one place where he would be able to discover its secrets: the British Library.

  If there was one aspect of life that Alain had tried to teach his son about, it was reading. Jonathan had many early memories of sitting in his dad’s lap with a big book on his knees, spelling out words and laughing at the funny pictures. Alain seemed more at ease dealing with unreal worlds and fantasy stories than real life. He took Jonathan on regular visits to libraries across London, and made sure that he was a registered reader at all of them. They would sit side-by-side on one of the long reading desks, Jonathan copying the careful way in which his dad turned the pages. In all those years it was the closest they ever got to each other.

  The tube came to a sudden, jarring halt, knocking Jonathan off balance and sending him flying into the overweight tourist. The man barked out in surprise, only just managing to steady himself.

  “Sorry,” Jonathan mumbled.

  The tourist glared at him, and resumed staring into space.

  After the longest ten-minute journey of Jonathan’s life, the carriage pulled into King’s Cross tube station. Those who disembarked were herded like livestock towards three ticket barriers, not nearly enough for the amount of people trying to get through. With a great amount of pushing and swearing, the crowd fought to be at the front of the swell. Jonathan waited at the back, brimming with impatience. With his dad in hospital, it was down to him to carry on Alain’s desperate quest, even though Jonathan wasn’t sure what he was looking for, or what secrets awaited him in the pages of The Darkest Descent. All he did know was that he was close, and that he was determined to find some answers.

  With its complex series of twisting tunnels and staircases, King’s Cross Underground resembled a living organism. Humans flowed through its veins and arteries like red blood cells, racing and colliding against one another. Whichever platform they were heading for, whether it was for the Victoria Line, the Metropolitan Line or the Piccadilly Line, they all seemed to know exactly where they were going, always kept their gaze fixed directly in front of them. Jonathan cut into the slipstream of people and circled up and out of the station.

  It felt good to be outside, despite the fact that it had started to spit with rain. In front of the station there was some major sort of construction work going on, and parts of the road had been dug up. The sound of drilling rang in Jonathan’s ears. With all the barriers and contradictory pedestrian signs it wasn’t obvious which was the way to the library, but Jonathan knew the route. He went right past St Pancras Station, King’s Cross’s gloomy older brother, narrowly avoided getting knocked down crossing Midland Road, and found himself at his destination.

  The British Library was a modern, redbrick building on a corner of Euston Road. Jonathan wandered past a coffee shop and entered the front yard. Around him there were raised, neatly-clipped hedgerows and large rocks balanced at even intervals on plinths. There was an overwhelming atmosphere of order and calm about the layout. To his left, a big bronze statue of a crouching man peeped over the hedges at Jonathan. Behind the library’s gently sloping roof, the gothic tower of St Pancras Station loomed over it, trapped in a cage of scaffolding.

  Jonathan trudged through the yard, and through the automatic doors that marked the entrance to the library. Inside it was bright and spacious. He was in the foyer area of a vast main hall. In front of him a network of floors and staircases rose up to the roof, like the cross-section of an ants’ nest. To his left, a large painting slashed with vivid colours stretched across the wall. Somewhere in the hall, a recording of African tribal music was playing, and the noise of the drums drowned out the chattering of the people around him. If anything, the scene resembled a posh department store more than a library.

  Jonathan went straight up the narrow escalator to the first floor, and then wandered past a giant glass bookcase filled with old books that made him think of home. The reading room was tucked away in the left hand corner of the firs
t floor. The librarian at the front desk smiled in recognition when she saw him.

  “Hello, Jonathan. Where’s your dad?”

  “Hi, Jenny. He’s ill again. But there’s this book that I really need to read for school, and I can’t find it anywhere else.”

  “You know you’re too young to come in on your own.”

  “Come on, Jenny. I’m always here. And it’s only one book!”

  The librarian frowned, and then leaned forward and said in a whisper, “OK. This once. But I’m going to get in terrible trouble if anything goes wrong.”

  Jonathan grinned. “It’s a library! What can go wrong?”

  He moved on past the desk, and found himself a seat in a secluded corner of the reading room. There was something very particular about the place – the low ceiling, the muted lighting, the smell of the carpet – that brought back memories of the time Jonathan had spent here watching his dad read in silent admiration. Within these walls it had almost been possible to pretend that they had a normal father–son relationship. He shook his head. There was no time for that sort of thing now.

  Getting books from this library wasn’t as simple as pulling them off the shelves. Jonathan had to type the name of the book he wanted and his seat number into one of the banks of computers installed near the reading desks. Then the librarians would fetch it up from the store. Jonathan liked to imagine that deep in underground London, there was a vast labyrinth of books, cavern after cavern, which librarians searched with powerful torches and weapons. When his book had been retrieved, a light would flick on at his reading desk. There was no way of knowing how long that would be. Until then, he would just have to wait. Jonathan sat back in his chair and felt himself dozing off.

  He awoke with a start. Since he had fallen asleep the reading room had filled up, and every available space around him had been taken. He hoped that he hadn’t been snoring. The light on his desk was on, and Jonathan went up to the main desk to collect the book. The elderly librarian looked up sharply when he heard his request, and placed a black, unassuming volume on the counter. Then he opened a register and handed Jonathan a pen.

  “You’ll have to sign here.”

  “I’ve never had to do this before.”

  The librarian said nothing; merely tapped the page with his pen. Only three signatures had been entered into the register, the earliest entry a Horace Carmichael back in 1942. Jonathan added his name to the list and headed back to his seat. The librarian silently watched him go.

  Now that it was in his hands, Jonathan felt the excitement building within him. Resisting the urge to go straight to the page number his dad had written down, he leafed through the book’s pages. According to the introduction, The Darkest Descent had been written by a man called Raphael Stevenson, who in Victorian times had been a famous explorer. He had spent the early parts of his life travelling round distant corners of the earth, meeting foreign tribes and fighting off wild animals. However, in his mid-forties Stevenson had gone insane, and he had been committed to a lunatic asylum. The page that Alain had referenced came towards the end of the book, where the writing started to become strange and evasive:

  On returning from my travels in the Indian subcontinent, I succumbed to a dull lethargy that left me lying dazed and listless in my bed for days on end. At first I believed that I had caught some kind of foreign virus, but then I realized that, instead, my life was merely lacking the day-to-day excitements and dangers that I had experienced abroad. One foggy evening I resolved to raise myself from my slumber and spend my nights in search of . . . darkness.

  My night-time wanderings took me deeper into the black heart of London, where women stood cackling like fowl outside public houses and men hid in doorways with evil intent. More than once I owed a debt of gratitude to my stout walking stick. However, after a period of time I became more accustomed to the nefarious character of the area, and felt able to speak to its denizens.

  At first my clothing and demeanour attracted suspicion, but gradually people began to open up to me. I spent shilling after shilling buying drinks in dirty gin palaces, trying to extract information from the lowest and most shameful creatures in London.

  But whenever I would bring up the subject of darkness, and its whereabouts, they would share a meaningful glance and fall silent. Sometimes one of them would start to speak, only to be quietened by the others. The more people I talked to, the more I became convinced that there was some sort of evil wasteland here in our very capital, the glittering cornerstone of the British Empire.

  My ceaseless probings were yielding no results, and I was on the verge of ending my quest when I met a young street-walker called Molly in a seedy part of Clerkenwell. She responded positively to my gentle words, and promised to show me the way to an area of London she swore I could never before have witnessed.

  Our journey was a haphazard one, taking account of all manner of loops and changes of direction. When I questioned her about it she looked up with serious eyes and told me that we were following the path of the River Fleet. The River Fleet! A foul and noxious tributary that had been bricked over decades beforehand, such was the unsavoury character of its grim waters. I asked Molly how she could still follow its course, and she replied “I can feel it rushing through my veins”.

  As we walked briskly down to the River Thames, her mood suddenly changed, and she became very agitated, begging me to turn back and go home. I remained resolute, and we came out under the shadow of Blackfriars Bridge, where the Fleet flowed into the Thames. The river was at low tide, and we climbed down to the riverbed, where Molly showed me the yawning gateway to darkness. She fell to her knees sobbing, pleading with me not to pass through it, but my mind was made up. Had I known what I know now, I would have listened to her. . .

  Jonathan clenched his fist. This was what Alain had been looking for! And now he had found it too. He scribbled the details down on to a piece of paper.

  At the desk next to him, a woman sighed loudly as she turned over the page of her book. She was dressed in an all-white trouser suit, with her hair dyed a vibrant purple. When Jonathan turned to look at her, she caught his eye and smiled. He stared back, entranced by the white pallor of her skin. Her smile broadened, and she looked conspiratorially left and right before leaning forward and offering her hand. There was something very familiar about her, but the scent of her perfume haunted Jonathan’s nostrils, disrupting his train of thought.

  “I’m Marianne,” she whispered. “My book is very boring.”

  “Um, I’m Jonathan,” he replied. There was a pause. She appeared to be waiting for him to say something. “Why don’t you read something else, then?”

  “Nice to meet you, Jonathan. I would take out another book, but it takes so long to order one, and I have to go soon. Is your book interesting?”

  He shrugged.

  “Can I have a look at it?”

  It was getting darker outside, and the rain was now beating out a thunderous rhythm on the window. There was an alarm bell ringing at the back of Jonathan’s mind, telling him to be careful. He wasn’t sure that giving the woman his book was necessarily a good idea, but for some reason he was desperate not to disappoint her.

  “Be careful. It’s very old.”

  She took the book from his hands, frowning at the weight of it. “And heavy.” She sniffed the front cover. “Smelly too.”

  Jonathan giggled. He really wasn’t feeling himself. Maybe it was something to do with her perfume, which had a very sweet odour to it. At the next seat, Marianne carefully read the title of the book out loud.

  “The Darkest Descent. I think your book definitely is more interesting than mine. What a funny title. Why did you get this one out?”

  Jonathan had to stop himself from blurting the answer out loud. “I . . . my teacher told us to read it. It’s part of our history coursework.”

  She narrowed her eyes playf
ully. “Jonathan, you’re not lying to me, are you? That’s very rude, especially to a stranger. You should never lie to strangers, you know.”

  He shrugged again. Maybe it was time to get out of here. She had caught sight of the note he had made and was staring intently at it.

  “What have you written down there? Something else for your ‘teacher’, no doubt. Why don’t you let Marianne have a little peek at it?”

  “I have to go.”

  Jonathan tried to rise, but Marianne grabbed his wrist. He was surprised by how firm her grip was. He would have shouted out, but she was murmuring calming words under her breath, and he didn’t feel that scared, not really, and he might as well sit down next to the pretty lady with the purple hair for a little while longer.

  “That’s better, isn’t it?” she cooed in his ear. “Now, let’s have a look at that note.”

  Jonathan looked on dreamily as she reached across and unfurled the scrap of paper. “A crossing point? You really have been naughty, lying to me. You’ve been reading about Darkside, haven’t you? Tell Marianne what you know about Darkside, little one.”

  He giggled again, his head swimming. “It’s some kind of weird place, or something,” he said. “Dunno really.”

  Marianne clapped her hands together in delight. “Well, you’re going to find out! You’re going to Darkside, Jonathan! And believe me, you’ll have much more fun going with us than on your own. It can be a bit dangerous there sometimes. It’s good to have company.”