The City of Secret Rivers Read online

  During the creepiest and most disgusting day of my entire life, I thought I had handled everything pretty calmly, all things considered. But now there were rats swarming over my body, and all I could do was shriek really intelligent things like “Aaaaaaa!” or “GET OFF GET OFF GETOFFGETOFFOFFOFFOFF!”

  The rats didn’t listen.

  And just when I thought there was nothing grosser than rats swarming over me, they started swarming under me, too. I could feel myself starting to float away on a tide of rats. I stopped thrashing and grabbed for the nearest metal rung, but it was a little too high, and before I could sit upright, I was swept away by the rodent tide, into another dark tunnel.

  “No!” I yelled, as the sunlight and fresh air vanished. “NO NO NO NO!!” But the tunnel they were sweeping down was so narrow that I couldn’t spread my arms, couldn’t sit up, couldn’t roll over. I couldn’t do anything but be swept along by a current that was even grosser than the sewage that had swept me along before.

  Suddenly, the rats and I plummeted off a ledge into a wider hallway, and my back clanged up against a grating. Its bars were close enough together to stop me, but not the rats, and they kept swarming over and around me on their way through. Inside my head, two thoughts were chasing each other in a frantic circle, and finally, Get up and run! won out over Keep screaming until you pass out.

  But with an avalanche of rats weighing me down, I couldn’t even sit up. All I could do was lift up my head, which let me see a carpet of rats stretching off all the way to a bend in the hallway, a dozen feet away. Maybe I should have kept my head down.

  One particularly brave rat leapt onto my face. I growled at it and snapped my teeth. It jumped back as far as my shoulder, but it didn’t go any farther. It just stood there, looking back at me with a defiant expression.

  I guess it called my bluff. No way was I going to actually bite it, and it knew it, and I knew it knew it, and—

  There was something coming around the corner. It was a moving lump of rats.

  No. Not a lump of rats: a lump under the rats. Something the size of a small horse was barrelling towards me, sending the rats spraying up in front of it.

  The rat on my shoulder must have seen it, too, because its eyes opened wide in panic. It leapt off me just as the lump arrived and started shaking itself furiously, sending rats flying like a wet dog shaking drops of water into the air.

  Except this wasn’t a dog. It was a pig.

  A pig wearing a bathing suit.

  A huge pig wearing a bathing suit.

  A bathing-suit-wearing pig so big, it could make eye contact with a cow.

  CHAPTER 10

  Right now, there weren’t any cows handy, so the pig got busy flattening rats. And biting rats. And squashing rats against the wall with its thick, bristly back.

  The sight was simultaneously beautiful and terrifying: beautiful because the pig was doing exactly what I wished I could have done to the rats; terrifying because he might do it to me next.

  The rats, obviously, came down squarely on the side of terrified. Squealing in panic, the tide of rodents flowed out as quickly as it had flowed in – all except for one rat, which sprinted back towards me. I recognized its defiant expression. It leaned over the tattered remains of my jeans and bit my ankle.

  “OWWW!” I yelled. I stomped my foot and waved my leg, trying to shake off the slimy little jerk, but it hung on with its disgusting tiny paws.

  The giant pig spotted the rat and roared in anger. (Yes, he roared. No, I didn’t think a pig could roar, either. Trust me, at that moment, it was a beautiful sound.) The pig swooped down, teeth bared, then grabbed the rat’s ear and yanked it off me. The pig shook the rat furiously until it went flying, crashed into the wall, and tumbled back to the ground with a splash.

  The rat turned and brandished its tiny fist in anger. Then it clapped its paw against the bloody spot on its head where its ear had been and ran squealing off.

  The pig turned towards me.

  I sat there as still as I could. I didn’t know what you had to do to enrage a pig, but I figured complete inaction was the least likely alternative.

  The pig – or, wait, was it a boar? I never knew the difference – either way, he lowered his head. To charge? I broke my ban on motion enough to shrink back as far as I could.

  But he didn’t charge. He lowered his snout into a box that was tied to his neck and began rifling around in it. Finally, he grabbed something out of it with his teeth and gave it to me.

  It was a business card. A fancy business card, printed with expensive-looking embossed lettering. In the middle was an odd name. And below that, where the profession would normally go, was a single word:

  I relaxed a little. I was pretty sure wild animals didn’t hand out business cards before charging. “I’m Hyacinth,” I told him.

  I was trying to figure out whether pigs shook hands when he bowed to me. Something about him was so courtly and dignified that I curtsied back. (Or, I guess, I mimed a curtsy, since an actual curtsy would have required standing in a skirt, instead of sitting down in a shredded pair of sewage-covered blue jeans.)

  Then the pig rooted around in the cards and handed me two more.

  “Not at all. You got here just in time.”

  Oaroboarus handed me another card.

  “Sure. Why not?” I said. I knew from my grandmother’s farm how pigs lived, and if he took me home to a damp pile of oozy mud – well, under the circumstances, that would be like moving into the Ritz.

  Oaroboarus led me down the passage to an intersection, where a huge current flowed by. Somehow, I knew it was the Tyburn again. Downstream, I could see a warm, inviting light coming from a brick doorway. It looked like a short trip to get there, but when Oaroboarus saw me looking at it, he shook his massive head and led me in the opposite direction.

  Then he led me through a series of twists and turns, and we ended up at the exact same doorway I had just seen.

  “Couldn’t we have gone the direct route?” I asked.

  “Um, OK,” I said.

  We passed through the doorway into a round brick chamber lit by a cast-iron stove. Pipes sprouted from the stove, zigzagging across the room to a dozen different clanking, steaming devices. I had no idea what some of them were, but one of them – a contraption of rods and wheels, as tall as a refrigerator and as wide as a car – was an old-fashioned printing press, thump-thump-thumping away.

  Standing on a step stool so that he could reach the press was a boy who looked a little bit younger than me. I’d say he was in Year 7 or so, but his clothes were like no Year 7’s I’d ever seen. They were so huge for him, and so out-of-date, that it looked like he had raided his grandfather’s closet. In the flickering of the stove, I couldn’t tell whether his wild hair was dark blond or light brown. His smile was quiet but unmistakable, as if whatever he was printing amused him in a way that only he could understand.

  As I stood there, trying to figure him out, the iron stove’s warmth seeped into my bones a bit, and I finally realized how cold and damp I had been. I started to shiver, and no matter how hard I tried to control it, I could feel my teeth chattering.

  At the sound, the boy looked up from the printing press. “Oaroboarus! You brought me a guest!”

  Oaroboarus handed him two cards.

  “Gross!” the boy said. “Well, the rats won’t come in here. They hate the noise of the printing press. I’m Little Ben.”

  “I’m Hy-Hy-Hy—” I started to say, but I was shivering and chattering too much to get the words out.

  Little Ben looked concerned. He hopped down and carried his stool over to the wall, where there was a tall cabinet stretching all the way up to the ceiling. It had twenty-six narrow drawers, each one labelled with a letter of the alphabet.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “I’m guessing it would be under B.”

  Leaning against the cabinet was a stick with a pair of grabber claws at the end. Little Ben took it and, standing on his stool, rea
ched upwards with it and pulled out the B drawer. Then he reached in with the grabber and pulled out a blanket, which he handed to me.

  It smelled a little musty. I didn’t care. I wrapped it around myself gratefully.

  He reached into a lower drawer marked T, pulled out a cup with a tea bag already in it, and poured hot water into it from a kettle on the iron stove. Then he pulled a pitcher of milk out of M, poured some in, and handed the cup to me. “Sit there and drink some tea and warm up,” he said.

  While I tried to stop shivering, Little Ben turned to Oaroboarus. “I printed up those cards you wanted,” he said. He took a large sheet of stiff paper out of the press and held it out so Oaroboarus could read it. I caught a glimpse of a few of the phrases on it:

  Oaroboarus gave a satisfied nod, and Little Ben pulled his step stool over to another large clanking gadget. He slid the paper into it. After a few seconds of steaming and snipping, the gadget spat the paper back out, now cut into a collection of little cards. Oaroboarus picked them up in his mouth and deposited them in the box around his neck.

  By now, I had unfrozen enough to speak. “I’m Hyacinth. Do you live down here?”

  “Yup.”

  “All by yourself?”

  “I’ve got Oaroboarus to look after me.” He patted the pig’s flank, and Oaroboarus gave a friendly snort. “How about you? Do you live in the sewers, too?”

  “I’m just visiting,” I said. “I’m looking for—”

  I stopped, because I realized: what did I know about this boy, other than that he lived in a sewer with a pig? What reason did I have to trust him?

  In fact, now that I thought about it, there was something a little creepy about the way he was looking at me, with his little half-smile. No, it was more than just creepy. It was sinister. And it wasn’t just him. The flickering shadows that the furnace’s fire cast on the brick ceiling … the smell of sewage wafting through the red-brick archway … the endless pounding of the steaming machines … this was not a good place, and nobody who lived here could be a good person.

  My skin started to crawl. I threw off the blanket and leapt to my feet.

  “Is something wrong?” Little Ben said.

  I backed away from him, towards the exit. Oaroboarus leapt forwards and snarled at me, all pretence of courtliness gone. Move slowly, I thought. Don’t provoke him. You saw what he did to those rats. He’ll do the same to you! He’ll tear you apart! RUN!

  I turned around and ran.

  And I immediately ran into something. I slammed my fist against it in a blind panic, yelling “AAAAAAAH!”

  CHAPTER 11

  “I’m delighted to see you, too,” Lady Roslyn said. I stopped hitting her and tried to calm down. She put one hand on my shoulder. The other one held the umbrella, which was glowing from within – it looked like she had managed to hang on to the missing drop. She turned to Little Ben. “If you’ve harmed her in the slightest…”

  Little Ben blinked at her with feigned innocence. “Why would I hurt her? I was hoping we could be friends.”

  Lady Roslyn spotted the teacup lying on the ground, where I had dropped it in my panic. She gasped. “You drank tea with him?”

  “He seemed harmless!”

  “This is important, Hyacinth. Did he put the milk in first or second?”

  I stared at her. I felt like my panic was ebbing away, but I was still not thinking exactly clearly, and I was kind of confused about why we were discussing tea service when we ought to be running away. Running away from what, I couldn’t say. I just knew there was something terrifying in that room, and I needed to get away from it fast.

  “First or second?”

  “He put the tea bag in first, then the water, then the milk.”

  “Oh, dear God in Heaven,” Lady Roslyn said.

  “Would you like some tea, too?” Little Ben asked her, with that same smug smile.

  Before she could answer, Oaroboarus lunged for her, teeth snapping.

  We ran.

  To my surprise (and relief), Little Ben didn’t even try to follow us as we ran out of the archway and jumped into the Tyburn.

  Oaroboarus was a different story.

  As we struggled upstream, he swam behind us, his thick pig legs paddling steadily. He never managed to gain on us, but he didn’t seem to be getting tired, and I was already exhausted. On the plus side, I was feeling too worn out to keep panicking.

  “How much longer?” I gasped.

  “No idea,” Lady Roslyn panted. “Quite lost.”

  At that, I found the energy to panic. What scared me wasn’t that we were lost. It was that Lady Roslyn was too tired to whip up an ornately sarcastic reply. That meant we were in trouble.

  Plus, Oaroboarus was now catching up to us. We were getting slower and slower, and he was getting closer and closer.

  If only that darn pig weren’t so stubborn—

  That’s when I had an inspiration. I knew exactly why Oaroboarus had taken me the long way around to get to Little Ben’s lair, instead of just floating downstream. It was because he was too … well, pigheaded to take the easy way out. I mean, nobody ever said “as easygoing as a pig”, did they?

  And that meant that as long as we were fighting our way upstream, we’d never lose him. But if we just turned around…

  “Follow me,” I told Lady Roslyn as I spun around and dove past Oaroboarus, who by now was right behind us. He looked at me like I was crazy, and so did Lady Roslyn. Then she shrugged and dove past him, too.

  I swam frantically for a few moments, then looked over my shoulder. Oaroboarus was floating back where we had left him. I never thought pigs had very expressive faces, but I could see by his conflicted look that he was struggling, trying to make himself take the easy path of swimming downstream.

  Finally, with a resigned sigh, he reached into his box, pulled out two cards, and cast them onto the water.

  They floated down to me.

  The threat didn’t bother me. In fact, I wasn’t feeling afraid at all any more. Maybe my newfound courage was just a caffeine buzz from the tea, but it felt like something more. It felt like I could figure anything out.

  I floated along for a few minutes, letting the current carry me. With the umbrella closed tightly around the glowing drop of water, we couldn’t use it to cast a magic circle of light, so the sewage was just sewage. But if I closed my eyes and remembered the clean, clear river hard enough, it almost felt like I was back in it.

  “Where will the current take us?” I asked Lady Roslyn.

  “I don’t know this stretch of the Tyburn well,” Lady Roslyn said, “but it eventually leads into the Thames. First, though, we’ll go right past Little Ben’s lair. But of course you considered that before you arbitrarily changed our direction.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” I said, because as soon as I thought about it, I suddenly knew what would happen. “He didn’t bother chasing us in the first place. I get the feeling he won’t even bother sticking his head out as we pass.”

  “You seem to think you know an awful lot about that creature,” Lady Roslyn said. “Well, I know much more than you do. And I know that … that thing doesn’t always take the form of a young boy.”

  I could feel my confidence ebbing as mysteriously as it had arrived. “What other forms have you seen?”

  “I think, my dear, that this is another question it would be better not to answer.”

  By now, I knew not to push her – and, besides, maybe she was right. Maybe I didn’t want to know what that thing really looked like. “When you showed up, you asked if he had put the milk in first—”

  “That’s right. The British didn’t always drink tea, you know. Haven’t you ever wondered how boiled leaves from a Chinese bush became our national drink?”

  I could see where she was going. “You put it in hot water—”

  “That’s right. And when you do, it binds with some of the water’s magic and makes it less potent. In fact, if you put milk in first, it neut
ralizes the magic completely. But if you put the milk in second, you reverse everything, and the magic is more powerful than it ever was.”

  “But why would Little Ben want to give me a magical drink?”

  “It’s entirely possible that he was giving you some wonderful, generous magical gift. But some people – less charitably inclined than I – might guess he was casting a spell on you. It seemed to me that you had some sort of … let’s say ‘inspiration’ about how Oaroboarus would behave, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Followed immediately by an inspiration about what Little Ben would or would not do? I’m sure your lucky guesses have absolutely nothing to do with any sort of magical link that might have been created. He couldn’t possibly be spying on us through your eyes at this very moment.”

  We floated past the entrance to Little Ben’s lair. As we did, I got a glimpse of him through the archway. He was back on his step stool, bent over his printing press, with his back to us. He didn’t even look up as we passed. I had been right about that, but now I wasn’t sure it was much of a cause for celebration.

  We both kept quiet until we had floated out of his earshot. Finally, I said, “So why isn’t he chasing us?”

  “The kindly old woman with whom you are enjoying a gentle float is sure it’s just because he’s a tolerant, live-and-let-live sort of chap. Somebody more cynical might ask: does he really need to follow you, if he can already see through your eyes?”

  We floated along for a little while, until Lady Roslyn finally broke the silence. “If you get any more inspirations,” she said, “it might do to mention them to me at once.”

  CHAPTER 12