by Dave Butler
“I’m about the baroness’s business!” Charlie snapped fiercely, practicing. “Do you want to explain yourself to the baroness?”
“Excellent.” Gnat patted Charlie on the shoulder.
“But won’t they know the baroness put me in prison?” Charlie asked.
Gnat nodded. “Aye, they may. But for all they’ll know, she may also have let you out and sent you on her errand in the meantime. Trust me, Charlie. Be bold.”
“I’ll let the rope out slowly,” Grim said. “Pull twice if you’ve found a way out of the water and are leaving the rope behind. Pull three times if you’re in trouble, and I’ll pull you back.”
“Twice when I’m done. Three times for trouble.” Charlie repeated. He grinned. This was an adventure. It almost made him forget that he was trying to rescue his father. For good luck he patted the bulge in his coat pocket made by his bap’s pipe.
“Good luck, Charlie,” Heaven-Bound Bob said.
“Good luck,” the others echoed.
Charlie handed his hat to Grim and slipped into the water.
The water was cold. Charlie ducked under the surface and let the current suck him into the tunnel.
At first he closed his eyes. He immediately crashed against the sides of the tunnel, so he opened them again. He could more or less make out his surroundings. The gloom-moss grew down in the tunnel, even underwater. It looked different, more like a shapeless see-through sack with a light burning inside. And the light…the gloom-moss whizzed by his face too fast to be sure, but he thought the flames were shaped like tiny dancing people.
He went headfirst. The rope slowed him down, but not very much. The tunnel walls were rough, and he pushed his hands out in front of him so he could keep his head from banging into the many bumps. The gloom-moss helped him see, but it also cast pools of shadow in the dim light.
Charlie smacked into the tunnel floor and churned up a cloud of mud. Surprised, he accidentally opened his mouth. The sludge tasted rotten, and Charlie tried not to think about what it might be made of.
Soon enough he would reach the end of Grim Grumblesson’s rope, and if he hadn’t hit the end of the tunnel as well, he’d have to decide what to do. Charlie didn’t think he could pull himself back upstream against this current.
He bumped into the wall and stopped.
It wasn’t the end of the rope yet; Charlie could still feel slack in that. But the water hammered against his body, pinning him to the stone, and Charlie couldn’t tell where the current went. He groped around with his hands but failed to find the way forward. He peered through the dark water, but it was dirtied with silt now.
He wondered whether he should have been counting as he went. He knew he could hold his breath to at least a slow count of three hundred. Had swallowing all that mud squeezed out some of the air?
Charlie flailed with his hands and feet, banging against stone.
The water had to go somewhere, though. Charlie forced himself to be calm; then he held his hands out, felt where the current dragged them. He tried to follow the water, twisting his body to get into what looked like a tight corner, and the current pulled him through.
He plunged, straight down, and then abruptly leveled out again.
He careened off another tunnel wall, and struck the back of his head against the stone. It hurt, and Charlie clapped one hand on the injured spot—
and then the rope caught on something.
The loop jerked at Charlie’s waist and held him still.
The flow of water rushing around him pulled irresistibly and roared. Charlie tried to look back to see what had happened, but the water battered him in the face and he couldn’t make out anything.
Three times for trouble, Grim Grumblesson had said. Charlie wrapped his fingers around the rope and gave it three hard pulls.
He waited.
Nothing.
He must be getting close to three hundred by now. He felt banged up and frightened, and of course he wouldn’t be able to hold his breath forever.
He pulled the rope three times again.
It wasn’t just himself he worried about. Charlie didn’t know what the Sinister Man wanted from his bap, but it must be something terrible. And if Charlie couldn’t get out, what would become of his friends?
He pulled three more times.
Nothing happened.
He thought he felt something slither across his leg.
Charlie had to do something. He couldn’t think of a better plan, and he was running out of time.
He untied the knot.
The current rushed him away.
Charlie tumbled down the tunnel with his hands covering his face, scraping and banging against all the walls. His shoulder plowed through a patch of gloom-moss and knocked free several of the glowing sacks. They hurtled with him down the tunnel. Charlie hoped that he hadn’t just made the last and worst mistake of his life.
Another turn, and this time he slammed into the tunnel wall with the full force of the water.
He whooshed off again instantly. How long had he been underwater now? A slow count of four hundred, at least. What had Grim Grumblesson done when the rope had gone slack?
Thud, into the wall again, this time face-first. The current snapped him around at a terrible angle, and Charlie was sure for an instant that his neck would be broken. Then he was snatched away by the stream.
He hurt all over.
The tunnel opened, and he was hurled into open space.
Charlie fell. He saw dim yellow light around him.
“He-e-e-elp!” he shouted—
and went splash! down on his belly into a pool of water. It stung. Charlie had seen his bap tenderize a piece of lamb by pounding it flat with a spiky hammer. He knew now how that meat must have felt.
This pool was much bigger than the tunnel. Charlie thrashed with his arms and legs, trying to remember how the adventurers in his favorite books managed to swim. Whatever it was those heroes did, Charlie didn’t figure it out—he sank.
His feet touched bottom. There was gloom-moss in this chamber, including clumps floating on the surface of the water—the moss Charlie had dislodged with his shoulder. Charlie stopped kicking and looked around.
He stood at the bottom of a pool built of brick. The water was dark and cloudy. He realized he was in the sewer, and then he had to try hard not to think about it anymore.
A ladder of iron rungs set into one wall climbed up out of the pool. Charlie took big, bouncing steps over to the ladder and dragged himself out. The rungs were rusted and a couple of them were missing, but he managed to scramble over the gaps and throw himself onto the lip of the pool and lie there.
The air felt good on Charlie’s face and in his mouth. He lay still and enjoyed it for a few moments before eventually opening his eyes.
He was at the bottom of a deep shaft. The shaft was circular, and built of red bricks. Spouts of water poured out of holes in the walls above him and splashed into the pool below. He counted at least ten streams, and he realized immediately that he had no idea which one he’d come through. Water flowed out of the shaft in a calm river, and several passages came down to the pool by brick stairs.
Charlie was totally turned around. He had no idea which way to go to get back to the cell and his friends.
First things first. Charlie stood. He hurt and he shivered from the cold, but he could still move, and he scooted along the lip of the pool until he could get under some falling water that didn’t look brown. It wasn’t a bath, exactly, but he felt much better after he had stood in the spray a while and was more or less clean. He inspected himself while he was at it; he was still wearing his jacket and shoes, but his cravat was gone, along with several buttons of his shirt.
He heard noises.
Footsteps. Scratchy, shuffling footsteps. And a soft chittering sound.
Charlie dropped to his bottom and slithered back into the pool. The water was soupy and dark, but he let himself go under.
He would wait ou
t the new arrival.
Charlie kept his eyes open and looked up. Silhouettes arrived at the end of the pool. They looked like hunchbacks, with big legs such as he’d seen on pictures of Australian kangaroos. There were three, and the chittering sound definitely came from them. They turned and shuffled along the lip, shimmering in Charlie’s watery brown vision.
Charlie turned slowly in place so he could watch the silhouettes. Their motion didn’t seem human. They humped along leaning forward, and sometimes touched hands or knuckles to the ground. Once or twice Charlie thought he made out the flicker of a swishing tail behind them.
Also, the three creatures were carrying something in their hands. Maybe buckets. Whatever the objects were, they clattered loudly when they struck the brick.
They stopped, exactly in the spot where Charlie had stood to clean himself off in the falling water.
They stood and held the things in their hands over their heads.
Charlie shifted his position a little bit and squinted. The objects were buckets.
The people—or maybe things, because when they squatted and held the buckets over their heads they looked even less human than before—filled their buckets with water. Very quickly, long before anyone would have reached a slow count of three hundred, they finished.
Charlie waited until the intruders had turned and were retreating back up the way they’d come, and then he climbed out of the water again. He slipped to the steps and listened.
He heard chittering and shuffling and whimpering and the occasional sniff.
Charlie risked a peek around the corner and saw the backs of the three figures just as they disappeared up a flight of stairs. They were covered with patchy gray fur; they waddled; their big ears and twitchy noses shifted from side to side. They snuffled and they squeaked, and long tails dangled behind them.
They were rats.
Really big rats. Two feet tall, or maybe taller. The size of pixies.
Charlie froze, but the rats kept going.
He thought that rats had a good sense of smell, and he wondered why they hadn’t detected him. It must be because of all the water. There was the stink of the sewer to mask everything, and Charlie had washed himself off in the clean stream.
The rats and their buckets disappeared out of sight, and Charlie was left wondering what to do.
He only wondered for a moment. Then he started climbing the stairs, up, toward the surface. Up, to where his friends lay in prison.
Up, on the heels of the rats.
Not all the passages were well lit. Some were very gloomy indeed, with only the occasional patch of glowing moss to show Charlie where to put his feet. More rarely, a shaft of light pierced the darkness from above. Charlie squinted up these brilliant lightning bolts and wondered how far belowground he really was, but he had no way to tell, and he had to keep moving or he would lose the rats.
Charlie wasn’t sneaky by nature, but at night in Pondicherry’s Clockwork Invention & Repair he had to keep the noise down so his bap could work. He was used to stepping softly, toes first, and not bumping into things. Here in the sewers, where there was no wood to creak underfoot and betray him, it was even easier.
Charlie followed the rats along a wide passage full of clotted, slow-moving sludge, up a steep, narrow shaft, across a wide room. All of it was built of the same red brick, moldy and crumbling. It all stank. His path quickly became so complex that he worried he’d never be able to retrace it. He and the rats passed running water, falling water, still water, mud, muck, rubbish, and corpses, as small as storm-broken starlings and as big as a half-rotten horse that jammed up an entire passage.
There were other living things in the sewer, as well. Charlie heard them more often than he saw them, but out of the corner of his eye he caught ripples in still pools and shifting patches of black within the shadows. What terrible, blind, stinking things could live down in this choking stench? Charlie shuddered.
He began to see other rats. They crossed his path, sometimes ahead of him and sometimes behind. He was in a city of rats, on a rodent highway. The rats moved in the same direction, and many of them carried things. The idea of rats carrying buckets astonished Charlie, so at first he tried to squint and get a closer look, but when he saw that one held a hunk of mold-encrusted meat, he decided he’d rather not know.
However amazing and appalling the rats were, Charlie needed to focus on saving his friends.
Being sneaky seemed almost not to matter. More than once he stood within a few feet of a rat, right in front of its face and lit up clearly by the glow of gloom-moss. The rats did nothing. The rats didn’t even sniff at him, just clicked their big yellow front teeth and kept going on their way. He understood why they might not see him; he had read that rats had very poor eyesight. He was being as quiet as he possibly could, so he thought he knew why they couldn’t hear him, too. But why couldn’t the rats smell him?
Charlie hugged the darkness and moved on tiptoe. Should he walk away from the direction in which the rats were headed? After all, the rats were the pixies’ enemies, and they sounded murderous.
But if he walked away from the rats, into the darkness, he had no way to get himself out of the maze. He considered the possibility of just jumping into the next big stream of water he crossed and letting it carry him out to sea, but there was no guarantee that it would work. He might end up trapped against iron bars deep underground. Or he could be crushed and battered to death. Or he could simply be stuck underwater long enough to finally drown. Or maybe something dark and nasty in the water would eat him, or maybe he’d end up breakfast for a ghoul.
Clang-ng-ng!
Charlie jumped at the sound, and the rats around him went crazy. They shrieked, jumping over each other and pawing at their ears. Charlie pressed his back against the bricks and waited while they calmed down.
It must be their big ears. The rats had sensitive hearing.
Eventually the rats continued on their path. Charlie continued with them.
At least if he followed the rats, he was going somewhere. He was going where they were going. Wherever that was. And if it was true that the rats were always attacking Underthames, shouldn’t he eventually be able to follow the rats back to the pixie home?
The rats ahead of him scampered up a ladder and disappeared through a hole in the ceiling. Through the opening Charlie saw a grayish light that wasn’t gloom-moss glow. He felt a small thrill of excitement at the thought that he might be almost at the surface, and he poked his head through.
“Loki’s spats!” he gasped. Using Grim’s curse made him feel bigger than he really was, which he needed.
Because he was looking into a large room swarming with rats.
It was like a great hall that had been carved out of a rubbish heap. Thin lines of gray light showed that the ceiling was made of boards. He must be out of the sewers and in the cellar of a building, maybe a warehouse or a dance hall. The walls were still brick, and they were nearly hidden by mounds of junk. Charlie saw broken boards with nails sticking out of them, shattered crates, piles of dirt-encrusted pipes, stacks of withered newspaper, and rusted-out machine carcasses. Water dripped from the beams overhead and trickled down the walls like the sweat on his bap’s face when he was concentrating.
He climbed into the hall, watching his surroundings. The near end of the chamber was littered with heaps of things. Charlie saw his rats set their buckets down and continue on. There were other buckets and pipe ends and broken pots full of water. There were swamps of fruit, the rotten and the moldy and the good all jumbled together. There was a mountain of something that Charlie identified as meat, and he turned his head away. Rats continued to deposit things in the mess and creep past Charlie.
He was standing at the refreshments table. Of a meeting of rats.
Charlie picked up a short piece of heavy pipe for a weapon. Then he looked for a hiding place.
He found room enough to crouch inside the big husk of a furnace. All the gauges and doors ha
d been stripped off, and the furnace sat rusting and empty. For once Charlie was happy to be on the small side for a boy.
The rats chittered and scratched in a teeming knot of fur and tails. He had followed the rats hoping to get somewhere, and where he had ended up was a place with a lot more rats.
He might have made a serious mistake.
But if he could just find a way to sneak out past the rats, up to where the light was coming from, he’d be aboveground and back in Whitechapel, or near it. He still had clues to follow up on. He didn’t need Grim Grumblesson’s help to interview tobacconists, or to find the Anti-Human League, or to look for a Cavendish hat.
He stopped himself.
No, he needed to rescue his friends.
He was about to creep out of his furnace shell and back down the ladder to retrace his steps when he heard a voice. “My brothers, welcome!”
The voice was scratchy and squeaky. Charlie peeked out.
The rats sat on their haunches in twitching rows, each with its nose in the air and snuffling frantically. Something exciting must be happening. Beyond the rats, in front of them, was a platform built of wooden crates.
On top of the platform stood a gray rat. It was taller than the rest and had long, ugly scars streaking down its face. Both its eyes were milky white, and one was ruined by a scar that cut down from its forehead and continued onto its neck and belly. The scarred gray rat stood with its back straight, looking more like a little furry man than an animal. It wore a bit of twisted wire about the crown of its head, and it held a long sharp stick in its paws.
It was the rat on the platform that had spoken.
“My brothers,” it squeaked again. “Thank you for coming!”
The rats chittered. Charlie hunched his shoulders to try to cover his ears. The echoes in the hall were deafening.
Charlie was stunned not just by the noise but by the words. The rat was talking in English. He wondered if all Whitechapel’s rats spoke English. And then he wondered why they would bother—why would a rat speak to other rats in English, when it could speak to them perfectly well in Rat?
