The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) (29 page)

And he turned and strode away.

 

All roads lead to London. This is a firm conviction held by most Londoners, who know that in every hamlet and village in the country there will sooner or later be a sign or a milestone indicating that in this general direction is the metropolis, and you should count yourself damn lucky to be going there, whereas in London itself, not a clue is given as to how you can escape its boundaries because, after all, why would you want to?

In a similar way, there was a general sense that all things in London eventually led to the river. Although many inhabitants of the city lived in the shade of the hills beyond its northern bounds, even along the modest slopes of Pentonville Road or down near Charing Cross an unspoken feeling prevailed that the trend in London was
downwards
, bending towards the water. Of the railway stations that supplied London, only a small number did
not
cling to the banks of the Thames, and those few, such as King’s Cross and Paddington, were nested close to a canal anyway, as honorary riverside ports.

This trend of the city towards the river had both helped and hindered the designers of the new sewer system, opened with much aplomb when the first pumping station belched into life just beyond the city’s south-easternmost extremities. Gravity had been the mechanism that also, with a lesser degree of success, powered the old sewer system. This had broached the riverside with a number of tunnels that slipped discreetly out into the water to the east of the Houses of Parliament - and whose contents had in recent memory caused such stinks throughout the whole river that parliament had been forced to close, for fear of deadly miasmas carried by the smell of sewage. Then, and only then, had the funds for a new system been provided - but the old tunnels remained.

One of these tunnels came out half a mile downriver of the Tower of London. It had a small opening barely large enough for a child, let alone the fully grown Lin - and for the rats that snuffled, oblivious to humankind’s presence nearby. Until, that is, Tate barked at them and charged with teeth bared. It was here that Scuttle stopped, sniffed the air and announced, ‘Righty-righto. This’ll do.’

Even then they had to wait for the tide, which had been rushing in and lapping the sides of the tunnel when they arrived. This took time. And time was something Thomas felt they couldn’t afford.

 

This is why:

Horatio Lyle sits at a workbench in the light of a single dull candle underneath the black cavernous roof, and chews the end of a pencil.

He lays out paper in front of him, considers its blankness, half-closes his eyes, and remembers the images that Berwick had shown him, the shape of the thing, the details of its design, every dot and line. And he knows that this, here before him, would be a futile exercise were it not that, now he understands
what
the Machine is, now he realizes the scale of it, he knows it can work, and he knows how to finish it. He knows too that somewhere inside, there is a tiny, tiny part of him that thinks it is amazing, an achievement, a scientific miracle, and
wants it to work
. The thing is so very simple, the work of a few hours if you knew how to do it. His pa would have called it ‘elegant’, and so it would have been, if you forgot its purpose or the men with cruel faces leaning over his shoulder to watch him work.

He puts pencil to paper, and starts to draw.

 

The tide never changes so slowly as when you are sitting there to watch it. Usually the Thames was nothing more to Tess than a big, wet
thing,
that meant you had to go up- or downriver to find a bridge, if a ferryman wasn’t about; an occasionally inconvenient sloshy bit - not that she, Teresa Hatch, would ever be caught going
south
of the river, where expanding suburbs stretched towards such mysterious places as Vauxhall and the Elephant and Castle coaching inn. On that side of the water the brothels and music halls were practically one and the same, though more recently hidden behind the giant yellow-brick wharves built up by the shipping companies to receive their wares.

They waited until the sun was just a mucky brown splodge somewhere out towards Richmond, shimmering dirty off the changing tide. As they waited, Thomas twiddled his thumbs and tried to think about maths and geology and science and other essentially healthy things, and not at all about betrayal and death and sewage;
especially
not about sewage. He hadn’t thought to find an older pair of trousers for the adventure, there’d been so much to do ...

Tess thought about when she was growing up, and going underground into the sewers had been another way of life to consider, another means of surviving. She’d known other street children who, in their time, had decided to hunt down there for the things that people forgot and left behind - although Tess had never quite understood how some of the things that could be found in the sewers had ended up down there. Sometimes the other children would come back with no more than a few brass buttons or a shoe so rotten and muddy it would crumble in their hands; sometimes they’d come back with a spoon or a lost farthing eaten away by the slime; sometimes they wouldn’t come back at all, and their friends would wait all day on London Bridge for the tide to turn, to see if the body would be carried by or just washed straight out to sea. The most prized possessions of the sewer hunter were a watch, and a knowledge of the tides gathered from the pilot master or the man who ran the naval clock down at Greenwich that signalled local time to the passing ships. Compared to what happened if you got lost in the sewers, Tess had decided a life of crime wasn’t so bad.

And Lin thought about . . . nothing. Nothing at all. Perhaps, deep down, she didn’t dare.

 

‘What we’re lookin’ for,’ explained Tess in her special patronizing voice reserved for stupid people, friends, acquaintances and the general populace, ‘is this big place what has a Machine what we reckon’s gotta be really big an’ all, right, an’ it’s in the sewers an’ it were built by this bloke what built the new tunnels a few years back, an’ we reckon as how it’s got these big pumping things inside of it, an’ lotsa people gotta be workin’ round there so you must’ve seen
summat
, an’ we wanna go there. Oh, an’ it’s run by these bigwigs what are all big on machines - but like
Machines
with a big “M” ’cos of how it’s all nasty an’ clever an’ stuff - an’ it’s real important that we get there all healthy an’ all, right?’

Scuttle scratched his chin, which wasn’t due to sport a beard for proper sagely effect for at least another six years, and murmured, ‘Well . . . I might just know this thing what’ll interest you.’

 

Horatio Lyle puts the pencil down, looks up from his piece of paper and says, ‘I need some things.’

Havelock shrugs. ‘We can do anything.’

CHAPTER 16

Scuttle scuttled. This, Thomas realized, was precisely the motion that characterized him; there was no other way to describe the boy’s movement through the tunnels. As they worked their way into the darkness, lighted only by a lamp that gleamed reflectively off rats’ eyes and dripping slime, the short, jerking movement of Scuttle as he lunged from tunnel mouth to tunnel mouth was exactly as his name suggested - a crab-like motion; alternatively, with that nervous quality of a pigeon constantly turning its head to spot the vulture. Thomas watched Scuttle for all he was worth and tried to think about the physical properties of a crab’s movement, about what each joint did and whether it was a more efficient way of moving than, say, swinging a leg from the knee or riding a penny farthing. He tried to think about the science of scuttling, until his eyes ached; anything,
anything
to get his thoughts away from the smell, and the heat whose suffocating punch to the chest had knocked through him like a door slamming in the face, and from the strange liquid that swilled above his ankles and had seeped through his shoes to make his socks sticky and his feet wrinkle like pink apricots. Next to him, Tate paddled through the stuff, bounding ahead as best he could to bark at the rats that lurked in every corner. They rippled away from Tate’s teeth in a black tide, their feet making a splishing sound like raindrops in a puddle as they retreated from the light of Scuttle’s lantern, and Tate’s growl.

When Scuttle eventually stopped, he did so beside, as far as Thomas could tell, a dripping wall no more nor less foul than any other encrusted, rough brick surface in the endless maze of darkness. Scuttle raised the lantern to the wall and, while Thomas nearly gagged, brushed away a coating of thick brown muck to reveal a small marking.

It had been scratched crudely into the brickwork - two cogs, one inside the other, like the face of an odd-looking mechanical clock. Thomas drew a sharp breath, and instantly regretted doing so as it burnt its way down into his lungs. Tess squinted at the marking and said, ‘What’s this about?’

‘Dunno,’ said Scuttle, ‘but they’ve been croppin’ up all over since the new tunnels got opened an’ some of the old ’uns what dares says as how they’re markin’ out territory, see?’

‘What’s
territory
about?’ demanded Tess suspiciously. ‘Who’s pretendin’ to be the bigwig?’

‘Dunno.
But
. . .’ Scuttle grinned. ‘I do know as how there’s places down here what weren’t
never
put on the map.’

 

Havelock hadn’t lied. They had
everything
Lyle could possibly have needed, and more, laid out in a workroom of a size and scale that ’til now he could only dream of, a miracle of technology, efficiency and proper scientific practice.

Yet oddly enough, it was the
more
than what he just needed, that interested him most. He bit his lip, and found himself thinking, inexplicably, about voltages.

 

They found more of the marks, cut into the brickwork with a penknife and mixed with the notes of other sewer hunters going
lllrl2l3rl
... as they indicated their passage through the tunnels. At some points the tunnel became so low they had to bend down and crawl, with their heads bumping against the roof; with every bump Thomas imagined living, slimy things creeping into his hair. In other places the tunnels were so wide and dry they felt like a passage in a castle, cold and sterile, rather than a sewer. Sometimes they caught glimpses of daylight, seen through grates high above; sometimes they had to pass under veritable waterfalls of leakage, ducking through sheets of water that poured through the brickwork. Every time they reached another corner, Scuttle checked his watch and murmured, ‘We don’t want to get caught by the tide none,’ and tried not to look afraid.

‘We keep goin’ ’til
I
gets bored!’ replied Tess firmly. ‘An’ if you’re lucky an’ all, we’ll’ave found my guvnor by then and
he
can do the worryin’ for us.’

It was underneath a shaft of light from somewhere a long, long way overhead, that Tate started barking. He splashed forward, sniffing the walls and the air, and leapt up and down, sending flecks of brown muck spattering out from his ears and coat, and barked yet more.

‘What’s up with little Tatey-watey?’ Tess crooned at him. ‘Is little Tatey-watey bored, is he, is
heee
...?’

If it’s possible for a dog to look condescending, Tate managed it, nose wrinkling up in irritation and huge eyebrows sinking over his brown eyes. He scampered down a tunnel and waited impatiently for the ignorant humans to follow him.

Lin peered after him and murmured, ‘I do believe the dog-creature wants your attention.’

‘He’s a dog,’ replied Tess. ‘’Course he wants attention. But you can’t give him none, else you’ll spoil him, an’ you can’t spoil him, can you? No you can’t, little Tatey-watey, no you
caann’t
. . .’

‘Miss Teresa?’ said Thomas uncertainly.

‘Whatcha want, bigwig?’

‘Well, Miss Teresa, maybe Tate has a scent.’

‘A wha’?’

‘A scent.’

‘A wha’?’

‘A scent, Miss Teresa?’

‘Bigwig, I ain’t gonna repeat myself again none.’

‘Erm ... perhaps he can
smell
something that we can’t.’

‘What, down ’ere?’

‘Maybe. Apparently a dog’s sense of smell can be a thousand times more sensitive than a human’s - I mean, as if we could see and the colour red was actually a thousand colours, and . . .’

‘Tatey-watey sees colours?’ hazarded Tess.

‘No, I mean . . .’

‘He might smell Lyle,’ said Lin quietly. ‘I think that’s what the little gentleman is trying to say.’

‘Well, yes. Yes, it is.’

‘I can’t smell nothin’.’

‘Well, apart from . . .’

‘Yes, apart from the squelchy stuff, bigwig!’

Tate, who clearly felt that initiative was being lost, barked again. Tess frowned at the shadowy shape he made in the gloom, then turned to Scuttle. ‘Oi, you, what’s down that-a-way?’