“New?” said Dickens. “I doubt it very much. There are hundreds of ancient attempts at sewers under our city, Wilkie… some going back to the Romans… many of the passages all but forgotten by the Board of Works.”
“But remembered by the sewer-hunters,” I said.
“Precisely.”
Suddenly we emerged into a taller, wider, drier space. Dickens stood still and shone the bullseye in all directions. The walls were stone here and the vaulted brick roof was supported by multiple pillars. Along the drier sides of this bowl lay sleeping mats of every description, some of rough rope, others of expensive wool. Heavy lamps hung by chains and the ceiling was darkened by smoke. A square cast-iron stove stood at the highest point on an island in the middle of this concavity and I could see a sort of stovepipe which—rather than rising through the stone ceiling—extended downward into one of four adjacent sewers that radiated from this place. Rough planks on boxes served as a table and I could see dishes and dirty utensils stowed in the boxes themselves, alongside smaller boxes that might hold provisions.
“I don’t believe it,” gasped Dickens. He turned to me with eyes alight and a huge grin on his face. “Do you know what this reminds one of, Wilkie?”
“The Wild Boys!” I cried. “I cannot believe that you are reading those particular advanced editions, Dickens!”
“Of course,” laughed the most famous author of our day. “Everyone literary I know is reading it, Wilkie! And none of us admitting such to the others for fear of censure and ridicule.”
He was talking about advanced copies of The Wild Boys of London; or, The Children of the Night—A Story of the Present Day. It was a dreadful series currently circulating in galley form but soon to be published for the general public, if the authorities did not suppress it completely on grounds of obscenity.
I have to admit that there was little obscene about the turgid tale of wild boys living like pitiable animals in the sewers beneath the city, although I do remember a particularly gruesome and suggestive illustration of several of the boys finding a mostly nude body of a woman in their sewer searches. In another scene, mercifully not illustrated, a boy new to the Wild Boys group comes across the corpse of a man being consumed by rats. So perhaps it was obscene after all.
But who was to imagine that such a fantastical tale, indifferently told, was based on the truth?
Dickens laughed—the sound echoing down different dark channels—and said, “This place is not so different from my favourite London club, Wilkie.”
“Except that King Lazaree warned us that some of these diners are cannibals,” I said.
As if in response to our witticisms, there came the squeak and scuttle of rats from one of the openings, although it was impossible to tell which. Perhaps from all.
“Do we turn back now?” I asked, perhaps a shade plaintively. “Now that we have discovered the heart of the mystery of Undertown?”
Dickens looked sharply at me. “Oh, I doubt very much that this is the heart of the mystery. Nor even the liver or lights of same. Come, this channel looks the widest.”
Fifteen minutes and five turnings and scratchings on the wall later, we emerged into a space that made the Wild Boys’ living area look like a minor loculus.
This tunnel was a major thoroughfare compared to the low and mean sewers through which we had already passed: at least twenty-five feet across, fifteen feet high, the centre a river of quickly moving water—albeit a sludge-thick sorry excuse for water—rather than the mere oozes of mud and filth we had been scuttling past. The walls and brick path before us now, as well as the high vaulted arches, were built of gleaming new brick.
“This must be part of Bazalgette’s new works,” said Dickens, his voice sounding awed for the first time, the weakening beam of his bullseye playing across the wide thoroughfare and ceilings. “Although perhaps not officially opened yet.”
I could only shake my head, as much in weariness as in astonishment. “Which way now, Dickens?”
“No way from here, I believe,” he said softly. “Unless we swim.”
I blinked and realised what he meant. This brick walkway was wide—five feet wide at least, as clean and spotless as a new city sidewalk above—but it only extended fifteen feet or so in each direction from our tunnel opening.
“Do we retrace our steps?” I asked. The idea of entering one of those tiny pipes again made my skin crawl.
Dickens turned his light on a post two yards or so to our left. It was made of wood and held a small ship’s bell on it. “I think not,” he said. Before I could protest, he had rung the bell four times. The brash sound echoed up and down the broad bricked thoroughfare above the quickly flowing waters.
Dickens found an abandoned pole at the end of this strange brick dock we were on and he thrust it down into the current. “Seven feet deep at least,” he said. “Perhaps deeper. Did you know, Wilkie, that the French are preparing boat tours of their sewers? They are to be spotlit—women in the boats, men walking alongside for parts of the tour. A sort of bicycle apparatus will propel the flat-bottomed vessels while searchlights within the boat and others carried by égoutiers alongside will illuminate features of interest along the way.”
“No,” I said dully. “I didn’t know that.”
“There is talk of high society in Paris arranging rat-hunting tours.”
I had had enough of this. I turned back towards the tunnel from which we had emerged. “Come along, Dickens. It’s almost dawn. If Detective Hatchery goes to Leman Street Station and announces that we are lost, half the constables in London will be down here searching for the most famous writer alive today. King Lazaree and his friends would not want that.”
Before Dickens could reply, there was a sudden flurry and several clusters of rags floating around white, rodent-like faces exploded from the tunnel.
I fumbled out the pistol. At the moment, I was convinced that we were being attacked by gigantic grub-faced rats.
Dickens stepped between me and the surging, feinting forms. “They’re boys, Wilkie,” he cried. “Boys!”
“Cannibal boys!” I cried back, raising the pistol.
As if to confirm my statement, one of the pale faces—all tiny eyes and long nose and sharp teeth in the bullseye light—lunged at Dickens and snapped, as if he were attempting to bite off the author’s nose.
Dickens swatted away the face with his stick and made to seize the child, but his hand came away with a wad of rags and the naked boy was gone along with his two or three cohorts, skittering down the low, dark passage from which they—and we before them—had emerged.
“Dear God,” I gasped, still holding the heavy pistol high. I heard a sound behind me, from the water, and turned slowly, the pistol still raised. “Dear God,” I whispered again.
A long, narrow boat of no design I had ever seen before had glided up to our brick esplanade. There was a tall figure holding a pole in the bow and another at a sweep in the stern, although except for the high stern and bow and oarsmen and lanterns hanging fore and aft, the craft bore only a vague resemblance to an Italian gondola.
The male figures were not quite men—the faces were absolutely pale and not yet shaped into manhood—but neither did they look still to be boys. They were very thin and dressed in tights and tunics that almost seemed to be uniforms. Their hands and glimpses of their chests and midriffs between the ill-fitting costumes showed flesh as ghastly pale as their faces. Most strangely in the dimness of the wide sewer, each boy-man was wearing a pair of square smoked glasses over domino masks, as if they had ventured out of a midnight masked ball into brilliant sunlight.
“I believe that our ride has arrived, Wilkie,” whispered Dickens.