Tanglewreck (7 page)

Big Ben was chiming midnight.

When Silver heard the chime, she thought it was one o’clock in the morning and that she had been running for an hour. But then the clock went on chiming its grave and solemn toll, and she knew it was still midnight, or that midnight had come again.

The city was still. Faint car noises came from the road behind the old warehouses and wharf buildings, but in front of her was the river, no ships, no barges, only the stretch of water from one side of the bank to the other.

What should she do now?

She sat down, her back against a stone wall, her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms round her knees. She wanted to cry, but she knew she mustn’t. She pictured Tanglewreck in her mind, solid and secure and waiting for her, and she had a feeling that the house was doing its best to help. Then she remembered why she had come to London in the first place; because there was something important to do. If it was important, it was bound to be difficult. She wouldn’t cry and she wouldn’t give up.

Then, as these thoughts began to make her feel better, she sensed that the ground underneath her was shaking faintly, as though a big train was passing below.

She had the feeling of something enormous, invisible, and very near. Her heart tightened.

Gingerly, like a cat, she edged forward on all fours. How dark and quiet it was, the city breathing like a sleeping animal.

Then, she saw it, head down, just underneath her on the bank, drinking from the river, the water pouring off its tusks as its head came out of the water. It looked like a cross between a bull and an elephant. It had dark curly hair all over its body, and huge thighs and shoulders, and legs that sunk into the mud as it walked.

It took a lumbering step forward and the wall she sat on shook.

It was a Woolly Mammoth.

Silver didn’t know what Woolly Mammoths liked to eat but she wanted to make sure it wasn’t her, so she kept very
still as its great head swung round to stare up the bank.

Then she heard a voice, a boy’s voice, but high and piercing.

‘Get thee back into, Goliath! Get thee back into, afore thee be seen by Devils.’

The Mammoth turned and shuffled off towards an open culvert in the bank. Silver couldn’t contain her curiosity. She stood up and looked down on to the muddy stretch where the river lapped, and the second she looked down, the boy looked up. He was the oddest-looking boy you ever saw.

‘Do you laugh at me?’ he said.

‘No,’ said Silver, ‘course not.’

But before either of them could say anything else, they heard a shrill whistle, like at the start of a football match, and then the sound of running feet.

‘Dive!’ shouted the boy, disappearing. ‘Devils!’

Silver looked round, and saw that Abel Darkwater was behind her, with Sniveller dressed in a policeman’s uniform, but a very old-fashioned policeman’s uniform. His feet were still bare and he was carrying a cage with a blanket in it.

‘Put the child in the cage,’ commanded Darkwater, and before Silver could run or fight, she found herself upended by Sniveller’s wiry arms and thrust inside the metal bars.

‘Got her this time, Master, snug as a bug in a rug.’

‘Let me go!’

Abel Darkwater laughed and put his face near the bars. His eyes were like two deep wells with faint lights at the bottom. Silver felt herself going dizzy.

‘I knew you would come here, to this very river, to this very spot. You can’t help yourself finding the way.’

‘I don’t know where I am,’ said Silver, weakly now.

‘Oh yes, Silver, yes you do, though you do not. The Thames is an old river, a dirty river, centuries have been pumped into it. The ancient Britons lived by its waters, and fought the Roman armies as they drew slowly up the river from Gravesend. Elizabeth the First sailed down this river to greet your ancestor Roger Rover at Deptford.

‘Now it is your turn, Silver. We are going on a boat journey together, and whether or not you ever return will depend on what you tell me about the Timekeeper.’

‘I haven’t got it!’ Silver jumped back to life, shaking the bars. ‘I keep telling you I haven’t got it. I don’t know where I am and I don’t know where it is.’

‘But you will lead me to it. I am certain, oh yes, very certain. Sniveller, pick up the cage and carry it down to the water, and signal for the boat.’

‘Help!’ shouted Silver. ‘Help!’

‘There is no one to hear you,’ said Abel Darkwater.

But there was someone to hear her. Out of the darkness flew a figure of fury followed by half a dozen yapping dogs who set on Darkwater and Sniveller, biting and snapping, while the feet-flying, furious odd boy wrenched open the cage door and pulled Silver out.

He grabbed her hand and together they ran over the rough ground until they came to a manhole with its cover half off.

‘Down!’ said the boy. ‘Fast as a flea.’

Silver did as she was told and the boy followed her, pulling the lid over them.

‘My dogs will come down the Swan Hole,’ he said.

‘I can’t see anything,’ said Silver. ‘What swan hole? ‘Where are you? Where are we?’

There was a groping noise, then a flaring sound, and suddenly Silver could see everything by the light of a makeshift torch that seemed to be rags wrapped round a pole and soaked in paraffin. They had plenty of paraffin heaters at Tanglewreck, so she knew the smell.

There was the boy; about four and a half feet tall, heavily built, wearing a dirty blue coat fastened here and there by brass buttons, over a collarless shirt. His legs were in knee breeches, like the ones Sniveller wore, and he had no socks under his big heavy laced-up boots. His hands were like the front feet of a mole; spade-square with thick fingers. He had black hair, a very pale face, big moony eyes, and,
this was it, this was the thing
, he had the biggest ears on either side of his head that Silver had ever seen on a human being.

If he was a human being …

The boy watched her looking him up and down, and then he said again, ‘Do you laugh at me?’

‘No,’ said Silver. ‘You saved me. Thank you very much. My name is Silver. Who are you?’

‘I am called Gabriel,’ answered the boy. ‘A Throwback.’

‘A what?’ asked Silver.

‘A Throwback. That be my Clan and my Kind. We dwell
under the earth, and we do not live as Updwellers do.’

‘What’s an Updweller?’

‘You be an Updweller.’

Silver looked at the strange boy, with his strange speech and ragged clothes, and she felt two things simultaneously; two feelings so twinned together that she couldn’t separate them. She felt that she had known this boy all her life, which was silly because she had just met him, and she felt that she could trust him. Since her father had died, and Mrs Rokabye had come, and everything had gone wrong, this was the first time that Silver felt she had a friend. She didn’t think about what she felt, she just spoke straight away, without explaining.

‘I am in trouble. Will you help me?’

The boy nodded. ‘Let us go together to the Chamber.’

‘The Chamber?’

‘Come,’ said Gabriel.

Thugger was having an underground experience too.

He had gone down the hidden flight of stairs into the cellars, and as soon as his feet had touched the bottom step, the opening to the reading room above had closed with a dreadful grinding noise. However he was going to get out would not be the way he had come in.

He swallowed hard and decided to be brave. It was very dark so he got out his torch and flashed it around.

Cobwebs everywhere, YUK! which meant spiders everywhere, big YUK! And the biggest YUK! of all was the slime. His fingers turned green from feeling their way along the walls. Suppose he was walking into a sewer?

Sewers meant rats, and Thugger didn’t like rats.

At last he found a door and opened it thankfully. Doors meant rooms or passageways, and rooms and passageways led out of sewers.

He went into the room – nothing there, but there was another door. He opened it into a room with two doors, tried one, and found it led into a room with three doors. He went back and tried the second door of the second room. It led into another room with three doors, which led into
another room with four doors, and now the doors were like mirrors, every one identical, every one showing him the same thing, but multiplying themselves, so that he no longer knew which doors he had tried and which doors were untried.

He panicked, and ran through the rooms, pulling open the doors. There were echoes too – footsteps, his own, they must be his own. The rooms were an echo chamber and the noises were delayed, because even when he stood still he could hear footsteps in the other rooms.

‘Who’s there?’ he called, and the voice answered, ‘THERE THERE THERE.’

He spun round. Where where where?

‘Who are you?’

‘YOU YOU YOU,’ the voice said.

‘I’m not scared!’

‘SCARED SCARED SCARED.’

‘I’ve got to get out of ’ere,’ Thugger whispered to himself so that the Echo wouldn’t hear him, but it did hear him, and chased him step by step and room by room, as he went on through the endless house.

‘HERE HERE HERE.’

‘It’s just my voice,’ he said. ‘I’m lost and I don’t like it, that’s all, but there’s nothing to worry about.’

Then he fell over. No, he didn’t fall over, he was tripped up; someone or something had put out their hand and pulled him flat on his nose. Punching wildly, his closed fist hit a solid object that straight away hit him back right over the
head. As he lost consciousness he had the feeling that he knew what, or who, it was.

Silver had never seen anything like the underground world of the Throwbacks.

She followed Gabriel down a narrow passage about six inches deep in water. She had no shoes on, and running through the city had torn her socks. Now she was footsore and soaked, but she didn’t say anything, just hoisted up her jeans and pyjamas to keep them dry, and walked as quickly as she could. Bits of rubbish were floating about in the water; old crisp packets and burger boxes, and she was glad when they began to move slightly uphill, and the water shallowed out to indented puddles in the clay floor.

Gabriel didn’t speak to Silver until they were able to walk side by side.

‘This be the way to the Chamber, but we must go by the Devils.’

‘Who are the Devils?’

‘You shall see them.’

The roof of the passage was getting higher, when suddenly Gabriel doused his torch in a puddle and pulled Silver into an opening in the wall. As they stood still and silent as statues, she could hear voices approaching, and then she saw four men wearing red waterproof suits and full-face helmets with some
kind of air filter on the front. They carried high-pressure water guns. She guessed they were for the maintenance of the drains or something like that. Whatever they were, they weren’t devils, but Gabriel was trembling.

As soon as the men had gone by, towards the culvert where the Mammoth had come in, Gabriel took Silver’s hand and they started on their journey again. He was fearful, and kept looking round.

‘It’s all right, Gabriel,’ said Silver. ‘They are human beings like us. Um, well, like me, but men, and grown up. They aren’t devils.’

‘Did you not see their red bodies and their heads of monsters and their weapons?’

‘Those were just waterproof clothes and water guns and some sort of safety helmet, that’s all. When they take it off they look like humans, like Updwellers.’

‘They cannot take off their heads and bodies,’ said Gabriel, ‘and I have seen them use their water-weapons. Water is soft but the Devils magic it hard as iron.’

‘It’s pressurised,’ said Silver.

‘You do not know them,’ said Gabriel. ‘It is Goliath they seek.’

‘The Mammoth.’

‘Yea. The Devils will kill him with their weapons.’

‘Gabriel,’ said Silver, ‘do you ever go above ground?’

‘We cannot live Upground. We can go there but we cannot live there. We would be killed.’

‘Who would kill you?’

‘Devils or Wardens or the soldiers, or the White Lead Man.’

Silver couldn’t understand this at all, so she fell silent and looked around her to see what these tunnels and passages were.

They were built of brick, and here and there steel ladders were anchored to the walls, leading upwards, she supposed, to the pavement and all those metal plates and grilles that you can see when you walk around the city. She had never thought about what was underneath all those plates and grilles. She had never guessed that there might be a whole world.

A rumbling through the wall made her think that they must be near a Tube train station. She glanced at Gabriel; he didn’t seem bothered by the noise.

‘What’s that?’ she said, to see if he knew what it was.

‘That be the Long Wagon,’ said Gabriel. ‘Updwellers use him when they come down here. They fear to walk here by themselves. They come all together in the Long Wagon.’

‘Why do they come down here – the Updwellers?’

Silver knew that everybody used the Tube to travel round the city, but she wanted to know what Gabriel thought about it.

‘It be their loneliness,’ he said. ‘Updwellers be lonely for the ground they come from. They come here to remember.’

Silver was beginning to realise that Gabriel’s world was not like her own world one bit. But then her world had a lot
wrong with it, so she wasn’t going to say anything rude about his.

‘Updwellers lived here once. Look and see.’

Gabriel opened a little door in the wall and led her on to a deserted platform.

At first it looked like any other Tube station platform, but then Silver realised that the posters on the walls were from the Second World War, because all the people in them were wearing gas masks.

‘Updwellers,’ repeated Gabriel, and sure enough, they came to a row of rotting stripy mattresses, with blankets still thrown on them, and here and there old newspapers and magazines.

‘Air-raid shelters,’ said Silver, who had read about the war.

‘This be the time when all people dwelt underground,’ said Gabriel.