Beneath London Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by James P. Blaylock

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The Dark Realm

  One: Mr. Treadwell and Mr. Snips

  Two: A Golden Afternoon

  Three: Elysium Asylum

  Four: The Pawnbroker’s

  Five: Mother Laswell’s Request

  Six: Beaumont’s Reward

  Seven: Hereafter Farm

  Eight: The Broken Lens

  Nine: The London Metropolitan Police

  Ten: Leaving for London

  Eleven: Upside Down

  Twelve: Miss Bracken

  Thirteen: Ned Ludd

  Fourteen: The View from the River

  Fifteen: Beneath London

  Sixteen: Fell House

  Seventeen: The Gipsy Encampment

  Eighteen: Sleep Like Death

  Nineteen: The Half Toad Inn

  Twenty: Beaumont in the Morning

  Twenty-One: Breakfast

  Twenty-Two: Aura Goggles

  Twenty-Three: The Travails of Miss Bracken

  Twenty-Four: Out of the Frying Pan

  Twenty-Five: Bow Street Police Station

  Twenty-Six: The Prisoner

  Twenty-Seven: Mr. Nobel’s Ingenious Dynamite

  Twenty-Eight: Mr. Lewis at Work

  Twenty-Nine: In at the Window

  Thirty: At the Dead House

  Thirty-One: Three Severed Heads

  Thirty-Two: Finn and Clara

  Thirty-Three: Flight

  Thirty-Four: The Calm Before

  Thirty-Five: The Madhouse

  Thirty-Six: Narbondo’s Alley

  Thirty-Seven: The Chase

  Thirty-Eight: The Painted Box

  Thirty-Nine: Commodore Nutt

  Forty: The Black Flag

  Forty-One: The Battle

  Forty-Two: The Penultimate Ending

  Epilogue: The First Snowfall

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

  AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Homunculus

  Lord Kelvin’s Machine

  The Aylesford Skull

  Beneath London

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783292608

  Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783292615

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: June 2015

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  James P. Blaylock asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Copyright © 2015 James P. Blaylock

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  As ever, this book is for Viki

  And for John and Danny, best of all possible sons

  “Men do not change, they unmask themselves.”

  MADAME DE STAEL

  PROLOGUE

  THE DARK REALM

  The distances that stretched away on three sides of the great cavern lay in perpetual half-darkness, with absolute darkness above, the invisible ceiling of the cavern supported by limestone columns as big around as forest oaks. Now and then Beaumont could discern the pale tips of stalactites overhead, conical shadows standing out against the darkness. He could hear the sound of ambitious bats skittering about, which meant that night was falling in the surface world. The ruins of a stone wall built in a long-forgotten time were just visible to the southeast, according to the compass that Beaumont carried in his pocket.

  The track he followed ascended to a secret passage on Hampstead Heath very near the Highgate Ponds. It was a four-hour journey, and he intended to complete it before the moon rose over London. He rarely had need of a torch to find his way topside, although he carried one of his own making beneath his oilskin cloak, which he wore against the wet of the upper reaches where the underground London Rivers, the Tyburn and the Westbourne and the Fleet, leaked through their brick-and-mortar floor and through the cracks and crevices in the limestone below, forming other nameless rivers in the world beneath.

  Behind him stood the stone dwelling to which his father had added a stick-and-thatch roof many years ago, the thatch well preserved in the dry air in this part of the underworld. The structure itself, which his father had called simply “the hut”, was built of stone blocks and was ancient beyond measure. Minutes ago it had been cheerful with lamplight. Beaumont had a plentiful supply of lamp oil in the hut, as well as food – jerk meat and salt pork and dried peas, and there was sometimes a feral pig to shoot, although no way to keep the meat fresh. It had to be butchered and hauled topside. It was a mistake to leave a pig carcass close by and so invite unwanted guests out of the darkness. He had seen the leviathan itself not far from this very spot when he was a lad, an immense reptile four fathoms in length with teeth around its snout like the tines of a harrow. Today he had left his rifle in the hovel, wrapped in oilcloth, along with several torches. He had no safe place to stow it topside, and no reason to carry it topside in any event.

  The ground stretching away roundabout him glowed with a pale green luminosity now, reminding Beaumont of the wings of the moths that swarmed around gas lamps late at night in London alleys – “toad light”, Beaumont’s father had called the glow when he had first allowed Beaumont to accompany him to the underworld. The “toads” were in fact mushrooms, some of enormous girth and as tall as a grown man – much taller than Beaumont, who was a dwarf – although these monsters grew only in the deep, nether regions. The older, dried-out toads burned well and were plentiful enough for warmth and cooking both.

  Those toads that were living glowed with an inner light, brighter on the rare occasions that they were freshly fed with meat, dim and small if they subsisted on the wet muck of the cavern floor. Fields of smaller toads grew in the shallows of the subterranean ponds where Beaumont sometimes fished. These were the brightest of the lot, dining on blind cavefish that swarmed in the depths. When he was a child, his father had told him that the toads were nasty-minded pookies, fashioned by elves at midnight, but Beaumont didn’t hold with elves. He had never seen one, neither in the underworld nor topside, and he had no reason to believe what he hadn’t seen with his own eyes.

  After an hour of steady travel he entered a bright patch of toads, where he could check his pocket watch, which he had pinched from an old gent in Borough Market. It was past eight o’clock in the morning on the surface. He was weary of the darkness and the silence, which he had endured for three days now. He saw nearby a pool of water glowing with toad light. A misty cascade fell into it from the darkness above, geysering up in the center and casting out a circle of small waves. Despite his weariness, Beaumont stepped across
the muddy fringe of the pool to look within – to do some fishing, as he thought of it, although not for the swimming variety of fish.

  He had always been a lucky fisherman, as had his father been, finding castaway treasures that had fallen from the underground rivers and sewers that lay in the floor of the world above. There had been gold and silver rings aplenty, some with jewels, and all manner of coins, including crown and half-crown pieces and enough gold guineas to fill a leather bag, which was buried in the hut under rocks for safe keeping.

  He took out a torch and used the stick end to shift the stones, and saw straightaway a fused ball of coins the size of a large orange. He waded out into the water and picked it up, then quickly waded back out again and shook the water from his oiled boots. Crouching by the edge of the pool, he broke up the ball of coins against a rock, swirling mud and debris from them, and carefully collecting them again from the bottom. He counted them as he did so: one hundred and forty-two Spanish doubloons. That they had come to this place was uncommonly strange: birds of a feather, mayhaps, the way they were gathered together. But they were clearly meant for Beaumont to find and no one else, which he knew absolutely because he had found them.

  He stowed them away and set out again, moving upward along a muddy game trail that had been trodden flat by feral pigs, some of them prodigiously large, judging from their hoof-prints. But these prints were old enough. They didn’t signify. And pigs were a noisy lot that stank; they wouldn’t take him unawares.

  Just as he was telling himself this, he saw the impression of a boot-print, half trodden out by the passing of the pigs. He stood still, unsettled in his mind. Rarely had he seen such a thing before, not this far beneath, not unless it was a print of his own boot, which this was not. He tried to recall how long had it been since he had taken this particular way to the surface – two years, perhaps. He moved on slowly, peering at the ground until he found a print of the toe of the boot, almost too faint to make out in the dim light, for the nearest cluster of toads was now a good way ahead of him. He had to be certain, however, of the thing that he feared – he was surprised to feel his heart beating so – and so he removed his cape and drew a torch out of his bundle, lighting the beeswax-soaked rope with a lucifer match and shading his eyes from the brightness.

  The shallow print was plain in the light of the torch – a hobnailed boot, the nails forming the five outer points of a pentagram and the five inner crossings. Beaumont quenched the torch in a shallow pool before moving on again as silently as he could, anxious now to make his way toward the surface, and not at all anxious to meet the man whose boot had left its mark in the mud – a man whom he had believed to be dead.

  He rounded a bend in the path, but stopped at the sight of a man who reclined on an enormous clump of vibrantly luminescent toads, his flesh and hair and beard aglow with the moth-green hue. The stalks had affixed themselves to him, his right hand and forearm deeply imbedded in the pale sponge. A broad, fungal cap had crept down over his forehead, although his face was still clear of it, and would remain so, for the toads would allow him to breathe.

  Beaumont had seen pigs kept alive thus, wounded pigs that had stumbled in among the toads and were imprisoned by them, sustained for years, perhaps forever. He could see the slow heaving of the man’s chest as he drew air into his lungs. His fob-chain was still secure in the pocket of the vest, stained green-black from fungal secretions, the fabric of the vest half rotted away where the chain was pinned to it by what looked to be a ruby stud, although the stone was more black than red in the strange light. A yard away from the imprisoned figure sat the telltale shoe, its hobnailed pentagram visible on the sole.

  Was the man asleep? Or was this a mere semblance of sleep, a wakeful death? Perhaps it would be a kindness to shoot him, although he owed the man no kindness. It wasn’t in Beaumont to kill a man, however, even this man, who was already as good as dead. But certainly it made no sense to leave such a man in possession of a pocket watch and chain. He stepped as close as he needed to and hooked the stick-end of the torch beneath the fob-chain. With a careful circular motion he turned three loops of chain around the stick, lifting the watch out of its pocket.

  “Father Time lives topside, your honor,” he said in a low voice. “He has no influence here below.” And with that he jerked the barrel upward and away, snatching the watch out of the vest pocket and tearing the chain stud away from the vest.

  In that moment the eyes of the captive fluttered open, glowing green and unnaturally wide, a look of terror within them, but without, thank God, any hint of recognition.

  ONE

  MR. TREADWELL AND MR. SNIPS

  “Only the two maps, Mr. Lewis? And very tentative maps, I must say. They were apparently drawn by someone with only a modest knowledge of the underworld. This is a meager offering, sir, scarcely worth our time.”

  Mr. Treadwell, the man who had spoken, wore a smile on his face – a smile that was habitual with him, as if he were in a constant state of subtle amusement. He was a large man with a trim white beard, dressed in brown tweed and with a comfortable look about him. He spoke in a light-hearted, easy tone, though his voice did not at all put Mr. Lewis at ease. Mr. Lewis, a small, pale man with the face of ferret and a tubercular cough, was rarely at ease, although never so ill at ease as he was just now. There was nothing artificial in Mr. Treadwell’s manner, and so Mr. Lewis was utterly incapable of reading him.

  “As you can see,” Mr. Treadwell continued, “I brought one of my associates along today. You can call him Mr. Snips – or not, as you see fit. People have called him worse things, certainly.” Mr. Snips apparently saw nothing funny in the quip, for he stared in a bored way in the direction of Admiralty Arch. Mr. Snips’s hair was receding, and he wore a small toupee inexpertly glued on, something that was apparent now in the freshening wind. It might have been comical on anyone else.

  They sat, the three of them, on metal chairs around a small table in front of Bates’s Coffee House in what had recently been the Spring Gardens, although it was now an area with islands of lawn and occasional small trees. The day was cool, autumn leaves skittering past on the pavement before lifting into the air and whirling away. Behind them stood the Metropolitan Board of Works building with its Palladian façade, people going in and coming out through the high entry door that had been eccentrically fixed into the front corner of the building. Mr. Lewis, who was employed by the Board of Works, looked from one to the other of the two men, his own countenance slowly taking on an appearance of desperation in the extended silence.

  “Snips is a whimsical name, Mr. Lewis, don’t you agree?”

  “No, sir. I mean to say… whimsical, sir?”

  “You have no grudge against whimsy, I hope.”

  “No, Mr. Treadwell, I do assure you.” He nodded at the alleged Mr. Snips, affecting a smile, and said, “I wish you a good morning, Mr. Snips.” The man turned his head slowly to look in Mr. Lewis’s direction, but his eyes held no expression at all and were apparently fixed on some distant object behind Mr. Lewis’s chair, as if Mr. Lewis were invisible.

  “Mr. Snips, allow me to present Mr. Lewis of the Board of Works, adjutant to the Minister of Rivers and Sewers,” Mr. Treadwell said. “I very much hoped that Mr. Lewis would find the gumption to make a bold stroke on our behalf after taking our earnest money and then betraying us to our meddling friend James Harrow. It was Mr. Lewis who provided Harrow with the ancient bird recovered from the sink-hole by a common tosher, a wonderfully preserved bird alleged to be aglow with an interesting variety of luminous fungus moss. And now Harrow is anxious to lead an expedition into the unknown realm beneath our city, there to discover we know not what, to our great dismay. But we cannot allow that to come to pass, can we Mr. Snips?”

  “No, Mr. Treadwell, we cannot. We will not.”

  “Mr. Lewis has thought to do penance for his sin by providing us with the odd map, such as you see here, but his efforts are less than enthusiastic. I have it on good au
thority that Harrow was given a set of first-rate maps, nothing like these mere sketches. His were secret maps, apparently, unavailable to the public – the public being your humble servant.” He pursed his lips and shook his head, apparently far from satisfied. “What do you say to that, Mr. Snips?”

  “What do I say to it, Mr. Treadwell?” He regarded Mr. Lewis sharply now, as if memorizing his features. “I don’t say a thing. I ask, rather: does this man have any family to speak of?”

  “Oh my, yes,” Mr. Treadwell said. “Seven children and a loving wife. They dwell in lodgings off Lambeth Road that are surprisingly smart, well beyond Mr. Lewis’s station, one would think. The Board of Works, however, provides wonderful opportunities to better one’s station with very little effort, you see. In this case the betterment was offered up by Dr. Harrow and a wealthy friend of Harrow’s by the name of Gilbert Frobisher, who has been very much in the news recently. Gilbert Frobisher has a deep purse, Mr. Snips, and he has allowed our friend Mr. Lewis to dip into it with an open hand. Mr. Lewis, understandably, has taken a special interest in their desires and very little interest in ours.”

  “Then I suggest that we have Mr. Lewis draw straws, here and now, to choose who gets his thumbs lopped off, oldest or youngest child.”

  Mr. Treadwell looked appropriately shocked to hear this. He held his upturned palms out before Mr. Lewis in a gesture of helplessness. “I’m afraid that Mr. Snips is a desperate rogue, Mr. Lewis, when the fit is upon him. I’m deeply appalled by his bloodthirsty suggestion.”

  “The two maps was all I could reproduce in the moment, Mr. Treadwell,” Mr. Lewis said in a strained voice. “It would take a mort of time to have the Board’s maps copied out fair, and a solid reason for asking it, too, them being secret. This makes four maps in all, sir, this past month, which amounts to very nearly the agreed upon number.”

  “Very nearly the agreed upon number, do you say? That’s scarcely mathematical, sir. If your banker used such a phrase, you’d be in the right of it to take him to task. But none of us are bankers, thank heavens. Our hearts are not bound in triple brass like the men in the counting houses. Now sir, something has occurred to me that might satisfy Mr. Snips.” He patted his coat pocket, nodded brightly, and drew out a piece of paper. “I’ll tell you what it is, Mr. Lewis, as plainly as I can manage. Dr. Harrow’s expedition is to be limited to three men and three men only. You see their names written down here, and I’ll warrant that you recognize all three. Two of them are, of course, Gilbert Frobisher and James Harrow. The third is a Professor Langdon St. Ives, one of Mr. Frobisher’s particular friends. Those three and no others are to be allowed permission to set out on this expedition. It is my wish that you limit the size of the expedition at the very last moment. Do I make myself quite clear? The area exposed by the sink-hole will be closed to any but these three men.”