The tunnel was tall enough to stand upright in. Foul matter was running in a slow-moving river along the middle and the walls were encrusted and slick. His eyes liked the darkness.
O come to us Walter come to Jacob he is coming Jacob is coming for the boy—
Jacob. His own friend. He wanted the boy for Jacob, that was it. Yes. The tunnel turned and divided into two and he heard a faint rustling from the easterly direction and climbed a short ladder and found himself on a platform, above a deep sewage-filled cavern. The far wall seemed to be moving and then he saw it was seething with rats.
Thirty feet on he came to a passageway. There was a flickering light within, a single candle guttering in a dish, casting everything into strange relief. It was an old cistern, with slots in the walls, most filled with the groaning half-stirring shapes of the sleeping poor. He stood a moment in the doorway, caked in muck. He saw the three children from the riverbank hunched in a corner, eyeing him warily, not laughing now. He stumbled to an empty slot, where a scumbled blanket lice-ridden and filthy lay in a tangled mess, and he lay himself down. He just wanted to sleep. That was all. Sleep.
He slept.
He awoke with a strange taste in his mouth, metallic, like iron. The candle had burned low, was guttering dangerously. Someone had put a knife in his ribs while he’d slept. It was sticking out. There was blood dried on his arms, his shirt. When he breathed, the knife handle wobbled back and forth. He peered down at it in surprise, then around at the shadowy cistern. It was empty. Where did everyone go? He gripped the handle with both hands and pulled and the knife came slowly out and then he staggered to his feet and saw the bodies. There were maybe ten, twelve of them. All piled bonelessly in their rags in a corner of the cistern. It looked like their eyes had been removed. The floor, striped with gore where they’d been dragged. Walter stared around in confusion.
He went out into the lightless sewer. Slowly, uncertainly. Retracing his steps. His head was thick and he wasn’t thinking clearly. It was night outside, a thick fog had descended. He stood in the darkness, peering out across the river at the weird yellow lights haloing in the murk. Then he was climbing steep stone stairs up to the embankment. Then he was standing in front of a lighted window, staring at a shopkeeper’s dummy behind the glass. He was so cold. Why couldn’t he ever get warm?
Later he stood in the court where his rented room should have been. All was in ruined silhouette. The building had collapsed. There were charred timbers sticking out of the rubble and he ran a hand over his smooth scalp, hairless as a catamite, and stared helplessly out at the fog and the darkness and then, his bare feet sliding over the sharp rubble, he went back out into the night.
The boy. He could almost smell the boy, a sharp metallic scent in the thick of the city. He turned and turned, sniffing at the air.
* * *
For a long time after the litch plunged into the river, Charlie just sat hunched in pain, in the middle of Blackfriars Bridge, the night rain drumming against him, pattering on the stone railing and the dark setts and the puddles shining weirdly in the darkness. He couldn’t stop shaking. His chest and arms were on fire. There was something wrong with his head, too, and he kept closing his eyes and waking up, not knowing where he was. The rain slowed, the rain stopped, a thin gray daylight filtered grittily over the wet. Then there were hansoms and coaches clattering across the bridge, and then clerks in dark suits and bowlers were trudging past, stepping over him, paying him no mind. Sometime later a constable tapped his knee with a truncheon.
“Walk it off, blackie,” the constable said. “Less you want a night in the stone jug, like.”
He got woozily to his feet.
The constable glanced, bored, out over the railing. “London Docks is that way,” he said. He gestured off downriver with the truncheon.
Charlie stumbled away, feverish, retracing his steps, trying to. The sky was lightening. It would be morning soon. All around him stretched a maze of crooked lanes and dark alleys and streetsweepers in rags and horses shitting on the stones and a god-awful stink of sewage wafting up out of the gutters. The vastness of it all made him stagger.
He slept for a time in a rotting doorway and woke to find a monstrous rat crawling over his foot. He stole a meat pie from a wagon on a street corner, stumbling out into the traffic of horses and iron-wheeled cabs muscling past, narrowly avoiding collision. His arms and chest looked wrong, swollen, the skin soft and painful to the touch. He should have been healing by now. There was something in the litch’s claws, some poison maybe, that went deep. He slept in a puddle in an alley somewhere near the river, soaked, and he awoke it was morning again. There was a girl in rags, crouched beside him, barefoot. A second, smaller girl stood behind.