The City of Secret Rivers Read online

  And now, as scared and confused as I was, whistling the tune filled me with a happiness I hadn’t felt in a long time. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn the glow was even spilling out of me, making the grey and dusty arcade seem bright. For a moment, out of the corner of my eyes, I even thought I saw Grandma reflected in one of the dirty mirrors, but I was already running faster and faster and everything was blurring together. I would have expected the umbrella to catch the air and slow me down, but it felt like it was pushing me forwards.

  Just at the edge of the arcade, at the spot where it met the pavement, there was a soot-covered Victorian drinking fountain. It obviously hadn’t been working for years, but now I could see a little stream beginning to burble up from it. It was half-hearted at first, but as we got closer and closer, the stream got higher and higher, until it was spraying up into the air and splattering down onto the pavement, where it landed on a dusty iron manhole cover.

  The water washed away the dirt … and then, somehow, it washed away the cover, too. Below it was only blackness.

  And now we were nearly on top of it. Lady Roslyn let go of my hand and jumped into the air, so I jumped, too. Then I remembered the umbrella and somehow manage to shut it in mid-leap.

  Lady Roslyn vanished into the manhole, and I went right behind her.

  As I dropped, my mom’s words flashed through my mind: Wherever we’re together, it’s home. I was finally on my way to get Mom back, and in some strange way, it felt like I was going home.

  CHAPTER 8

  And then I landed in the sewers. It turned out it wasn’t like coming home at all, because I had never lived in an old brick tunnel with an ankle-high river of poop flowing along the floor.

  As I hit the ground, I almost stumbled over face-first, but I managed to get my balance at the last moment. This was a good thing. It was bad enough landing feet-first in sewage. I didn’t want to even think about landing face-first.

  Unfortunately, as I stumbled, waving my arms, my phone fell out of my pocket. I reached down to grab it, and I grabbed something else about the same size and shape but much squishier. By the time I was done yelling “EWWWW!” and throwing the squishy thing away and wiping my hands on the least-disgusting-looking part of the brick walls, my phone was long gone.

  Darn. It hadn’t actually done me much good today, but it felt like my last link to the real twenty-first-century world, where things were powered by batteries instead of ancient mysterious forces.

  And now here I was, underground, and cut off from the world above.

  The smell was – well, have you ever opened up a nappy bin? Now imagine the baby had diarrhoea. And that it was a baby elephant. That’s pretty much what we’re talking about. But I didn’t actually mind the smell too much, because I had plenty of experience helping Grandma muck out her horses’ stalls.

  Of course, when we went mucking, Grandma always gave me some warning, and I had time to put on rubber gloves and thick rubber boots. Right now, I was wearing jeans and trainers, and moments after landing, I could feel the sewage soaking through into my socks and squelching between my toes. I could also feel a little bump every time something floated into the back of my leg, which was often. Way too often.

  Lady Roslyn, I noticed, had managed to land on the side of the tunnel instead of the middle. Since the tunnel was shaped like an upside-down egg, the ground was curved, which let Lady Roslyn stand above the flow, on dry brick. I quickly stepped up next to her.

  My feet were still soaked, but at least there wasn’t anything unspeakable bumping into me, so I could bear to look around and see where we were. It was a long brick tunnel, stretching off in both directions as far as I could see. Also as far as I could see, there were those little lumps floating in the dark, swirling, stinking water.

  Above us, the manhole cover somehow resealed itself, shutting out the daylight and leaving us in near-total darkness.

  “‘Underground river’ seems like kind of a charitable description,” I said.

  “Open your umbrella,” Lady Roslyn told me.

  I did, and then I gasped. It was like the umbrella cast a reverse shadow. Everything that wasn’t under the umbrella was still dark – but a beautiful golden light poured down on everything below the umbrella, transforming whatever it touched. As soon as they floated into the glowing circle, the little lumps of grossness transformed into wriggling silver fish, swimming happily through a little slice of clear, clean river, then changing back to brown lumps as soon as they slipped out of the light. One of my feet was outside the circle, standing on crumbling Victorian bricks; the other foot was inside the circle, sinking into the grassy mud of a river’s bank.

  “Which side is real?” I asked.

  “They both are,” Lady Roslyn answered. “You are standing on the banks of the river Tyburn, which has flowed through London since time immemorial, and you are standing in the King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer, which was built by…” She squinted at the embossed lettering on a nearby brick. “The Metropolitan Board of Works, 1861.”

  “But the water in our flat didn’t taste like either of those. It definitely wasn’t sewage, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t river water, either.”

  “Of course not,” Lady Roslyn said. “The anarchist cult I told you about would love to have water flow straight from the rivers into every tap, but nobody else is so foolish. You were drinking the same tap water as everybody else in London. But to reach our building, the pipes that carry that tap water must pass directly above the Tyburn, and that is enough to give them a magical charge.”

  Lady Roslyn took the navy-blue ribbon from the handle of the umbrella and used it to tie up her long grey hair. “One doesn’t want one’s hair brushing against the walls here, if one can help it,” she said.

  I nodded. I had never been more glad that I kept my hair cropped short.

  “Now,” Lady Roslyn continued, “do you feel a pull in either direction? Does one way or the other feel like the right way to go?”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I closed my eyes and concentrated. The only way I really wanted to go was back up onto the street, and then straight into the shower, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t an option.

  I opened my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “No matter. There are other methods. Hold the umbrella open above your head, but hold it loosely. With your free hand, spin the handle.”

  I tried it. The umbrella spun around and around like a roulette wheel. When it slowed to a stop, the curved bit at the end of the handle was pointing to the wall. And then, all by itself, it turned just a little more, pointing downstream.

  “I was afraid of that,” Lady Roslyn said. “The drop is heading towards the mouth of the Tyburn. When it has traversed the entire river, the Tyburn’s powers will be fully activated.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, Hyacinth, your mother will be far from the only casualty of the day.”

  She walked off in the direction the handle had pointed. I followed her.

  I don’t know how long we walked like that, picking our way in careful silence along the sewer/riverbank. Without my phone, and with no way of seeing the sky, it was hard to tell what time it was. As we walked on and the tunnel got wider and deeper, the manholes got higher and higher above our heads.

  Occasionally, we’d come to a place where other tunnels dumped their own smelly water into the stream we were following. Every time, I’d spin the umbrella, and it would point in the same direction we’d been going: onwards, where the river got wider and swifter. Every time, Lady Roslyn would shake her head and mutter “Tsk,” in a worried way.

  Sometimes, a bird would appear on one side in the umbrella’s enchanted circle of light and dart across to the other, where it would vanish. Sometimes it would just be part of a bird – a phantom wing beating in midair, while the rest of the bird stayed invisible on the other side of the magical divide. Once I even saw a sheep’s ear wobble by. But except for those little moments, th
e novelty of carrying a portable circle of riverbed with me was starting to wear a little thin. If you’ve seen one disembodied magical floating sheep’s ear, you’ve seen them all.

  On the plus side, the sewer was surprisingly pretty, if you ignored the sewage. The tunnel was gracefully curved, and the little stinking tributaries tumbled in through handsome arches. Rusting iron rings were embedded in the brick walls at intervals, at shoulder height. They looked like the ring Aunt Callie had tied her boat to at her cabin on Lake Erie. Did the sewer ever flood enough to ride boats through? What if it happened while we were walking through it?

  Eventually, I noticed that the umbrella was starting to quiver. The next intersection we came to, when I spun the umbrella around, the handle pointed forwards so eagerly that it seemed to be jumping out of my hand. I squinted ahead to see what it was reaching for, and I thought I could see a little patch of light way off in the distance. It couldn’t be from a manhole cover, because it was coming from the bottom and shining up.

  Lady Roslyn and I came to the same conclusion. “I believe that’s our drop,” she whispered, and started tiptoeing. I wasn’t quite sure why she was being quiet – could a drop of water hear us? At that point, anything was possible. I tiptoed, too.

  It turned out I shouldn’t have bothered. As we got closer to the patch of light, we could hear a rumble getting louder and louder, and by the time we reached the end of our tunnel, the rumble was a roar.

  We stood and looked into a huge cavern below us. It was like the Grand Canyon of sewage. Stinky rivers from a dozen other tunnels waterfalled into a vast brick canyon filled with a glowing lake of gross. Last time I had seen it, the drop had glowed, but not brightly enough to light up a whole lake. It must have gotten more powerful since then.

  Lady Roslyn started climbing downwards. There was no ladder, but there were plenty of bricks sticking out, and she used those for hand- and footholds. I folded up the umbrella, hooked it over my arm, and followed her.

  It wasn’t as easy as she made it look. The air was full of mist churned up by all those waterfalls, which made the bricks wet and slippery. And we were high up enough that if I fell into the lake and it wasn’t deep enough, I might break my neck. And if it was deep enough, I might get swept under by the same waterfalls whose mists were making it hard for me to keep my panicky, white-knuckle grip on the crumbling bricks.

  Thanks a lot, waterfalls.

  Bit by bit, handhold by handhold, carefully lowered foot by carefully lowered foot, I made it nearly to the bottom.

  It was almost time to go into the foul lake. Fortunately, I had a magic tool that could transform at least part of it into lovely clean water. So I opened the umbrella. As soon as I did, light spilled out from it, and when it landed on the bricks I was standing on, they transformed, too. Specifically, they transformed into thin air. I plunged down.

  Fortunately, the water wasn’t deep there. Unfortunately, it was cold.

  Lady Roslyn had been just outside the umbrella’s lit circle, so her footholds were still there. She leapt down, right next to me. She scooted over and put her arm around me. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather be in river water than the sewer water.”

  I nodded, and together we plunged forwards, towards the glow at the center of the pool. In a few steps, the water was up to our waists. It didn’t get any higher, but the swirling currents and the mossy rocks beneath our feet made it hard to walk. We leaned against each other and picked our way carefully along, until we could see the drop of water, visible as a single, brightly glowing point of light under the surface.

  Lady Roslyn pointed at it, and then to my umbrella, and then she mimed a scooping motion. I guess she was miming instead of talking because she didn’t want to startle the drop – but unfortunately, as she was doing it, her hand splashed into the water. The glowing point of light darted away.

  I swung my umbrella at it and almost caught it, but it was too fast.

  Now that the umbrella wasn’t over my head, I was once again standing in stinky sewage, but there was no time to think about that. I sloshed after the light. It dodged left, and then right, and then I nearly had it, and then it dodged the umbrella again. This time, it shot directly under the outtake hole where the water poured into a big black pipe leading who-knows-where. The drop must have gotten trapped in the current there, because it started darting back and forth in a frantic circle, trying to leap up into that pipe, but not quite managing it.

  I stopped, aimed the umbrella carefully, and scooped it up.

  “Marvellous girl!” Lady Roslyn cried, and slapped me on the back.

  Bad idea.

  It turns out that when you’re in the middle of a churning lake of sewage with a slippery floor, slapping someone on the back is one thing you should definitely not do.

  I started to topple over. Lady Roslyn reached for my arm, but she missed and grabbed the umbrella instead, twisting it out of my hand and making me lose my balance completely.

  For a moment, we looked at each other in horror.

  And then the current swept me away, straight into the outtake hole.

  CHAPTER 9

  The dark roared, and the bricks scraped my butt just hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to slow me down, and the twisting tunnel flipped me face down into the sewage, and then face up again just long enough for me to take three desperate gasps before it flipped me down again and then up and then down, and I gasped at the wrong time and ended up sucking foul water into my lungs instead of air, and then I slammed into a brick sticking out. It hurt like heck but at least it sent me spinning face up so I could suck in a smelly, humid gasp of air, and still sliding downwards, and still scraping my butt, and still gasping, and still downwards, and still downwards.

  And then, up ahead, a tiny pinprick of light, which was suddenly as big as a Hula-Hoop, and I got sprayed out into another cavern, and I hung in the air for a moment before I plopped down into an even bigger lake of sewage.

  I plunged downwards through the disgusting water. My feet scraped the bottom. I pushed off as hard as I could and swam up, my lungs bursting.

  And finally, with a gasp, I broke the surface and sucked in breath until my chest stopped feeling like it was about to explode.

  Closer to me, just above the water, I saw a little concrete shelf. Maybe it was meant for sewer workers to stand on, although judging by the thick layer of moss that covered it, nobody had stood on it for ages. I swam over and hoisted myself up.

  The mouldy brick walls of the chamber slanted upwards. From eight or nine storeys above me, a little light trickled down from the cavern’s roof, through what looked like a grating. Was it big enough for me to squeeze through, assuming I could get up there and open it? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t see any other option.

  Rising up along the wall was another series of jutting bricks. I put my foot cautiously on the lowest one … and it crumbled away to nothing. I tried again. It crumbled. I grabbed for a brick at hand level, and it crumbled, too.

  Darn it. Darn it. Darn it. I was stuck down here. Lady Roslyn obviously wasn’t coming after me, because if she had dived in after me, she would already have come shooting in. She must be lost somewhere else in the sewers – and since she had the umbrella, that meant the glowing drop was lost, too. Nobody else knew where I was. And nobody else, I realized, knew where my mom was. I was going to die down here, and Mom was going to rot away in whatever awful monster prison they had thrown her into.

  I dropped to my knees and took in a big choking breath, ready to burst into tears … and then I stopped.

  Because there was something funny about that breath. It tasted just a teeny bit less foul. And come to think of it, if I concentrated, I could feel just a little bit of a breeze on my wet face. But where was it coming from?

  There! Right behind the first brick I had crumbled – there was a little hole. I scraped away with my fingernails and it got big enough for me to stick two fingers in, so I stuck two fingers in and pulled with them
both until it got big enough to stick my whole hand in, and then I pulled until I could fit two hands in, and I kept going until it was big enough for me to fit in.

  Before I crawled in, I paused for just a moment. The opening I had made was pitch black. I had no idea where it led. All I knew was that there was a steady breeze of fresh air coming out of it. Was that enough?

  Heck, yes, it was. I crawled in. And I kept crawling.

  It wasn’t easy. The rough bricks scraped my knees through the tattered remains of my jeans, and if I lifted my head too much, I’d scrape that, too. But the breeze on my face kept me going. Then the tunnel started tilting upwards. And then I saw a dim light up ahead, and that kept me going even faster.

  Finally, I reached the end, and I climbed out.

  I was in a pit, and the third-best thing of all was, it was completely dry.

  The second-best thing was that there was a grating in the ceiling above me, and it was at most two storeys above. It was close enough to smell fresh air and hear traffic.

  And the best thing of all was, there were iron rungs in the wall. Sturdy-looking, rust-free iron rungs that led upwards, straight to the grate.

  I started climbing. I got about halfway and my arm muscles just quit. I couldn’t blame them, I guess – I had asked them to do an awful lot. “I’m giving you a minute, arms,” I told them. “After that, I expect action.”

  My arms chittered back at me, which was not something they had ever done before. Then I heard the chittering noise again and realized it wasn’t coming from my arms. It was coming from a pipe on the wall, level with my head. There was a scraggly rat standing just inside it. I started.

  “Don’t mind me,” I told him. “I’m just leaving.”

  The rat chittered again, very loudly. And then I realized I wasn’t hearing a rat. I was hearing rats. Lots of rats. Maybe I’d better move out of the way, I thought, but I was about three seconds too late. Thousands of rats exploded out of the pipe, crashing into my face, knocking me back down to the ground, swarming over me.