King Rat Part 6

'Down you come.'

Saul squeezed his hips through the hole.

Tut a lid on it,' said King Rat from below, and laughed briefly. Saul fumbled with the metal cover. He was half in, half out of the sewer. He sank under the weight of the metal. He held it above his head and descended. The light disappeared.

Saul s.h.i.+vered in the cold of the sewer. His feet clapped on the metal. He stumbled as his feet hit wetness. He backed away from the ladder and rubbed himself in the darkness. Air gusted and hissed; freezing water flooded his shoes.

'Where are you?' he whispered.

'Watching,' came King Rat's voice. It moved around him. 'Wait. You'll see. You've never tried this, laddie, so hold your horses. The darkmans is nothing to you.'

Saul stood still. His hands were invisible before him.

Shapes moved in front of him. He thought they were real until the corridors themselves began to emerge from the darkness and he realized that those other fleeting, indistinct forms were born in his mind. They were dispelled as Saul began to see.

102.

1.He saw the muck of the drains. He saw the energy it contained spilling out, a grey light that showed no colours but illuminated the damp tunnels. Before him a study in perspective, the s.h.i.+t- and algae-encrusted walls of the shaft meeting in the distance. Behind him and to his right more tunnels, and everywhere the smell, rot and faeces, and the pungent smell of p.i.s.s, rat p.i.s.s. He wrinkled his nose, his hackles rising.

'No worries,' said King Rat, a figure saturated in shadows, drenched in them, a ma.s.s of darkness. 'Some cove's staked a claim and made a mark, but we're royalty. His territory doesn't mean f.u.c.k to us.'

Saul looked about him. A thin rivulet of dirty water seeped by at his feet. His every movement seemed to set off an explosion of echoes. He stood in a twisting brick cylinder seven feet in diameter. From everywhere came the noises of streaming water and falling stones, and organic sounds of squeaks and scratches, peaking, dying out and being replaced, sounds far away being written over by those nearby, a palimpsest of noise.

'I want to see you leg it, staying mum as you like,' said King Rat. He startled Saul. His voice wandered through the tunnels, exploring every corner. 'I want to see you s.h.i.+ft your a.r.s.e, climb sharpish. I want to see you swim. School is in.'

King Rat turned to face the same direction as Saul. He pointed into the charcoal grey.

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'We're off thataway. And we're off sharpish. So pull your ringer out and keep up. Ready, my old lad?'

Saul s.h.i.+vered with excitement, the cold irrelevant now, and crouched in a starter's position.

'Come on, then,' he said.

King Rat turned and bolted.

Saul did not feel his legs moving as he followed. The rapid, faint beat of footsteps he heard was his own; King Rat was soundless. Saul could feel his nose twitching and he felt like laughing.

He panted with exhilaration. King Rat was an ill defined blur before him, his coat flapping vaguely in the noisome wind. Tunnels pa.s.sed by on either side, water spattered him. King Rat disappeared suddenly, cutting sharply left down a smaller tunnel where the water pressure was greater, swirling insistently around Saul's legs. He pulled his legs up out of the stream.

King Rat turned his head for a second, a flash of pale flesh. He crouched as he ran and pulled to a sudden halt. He waited briefly while Saul caught him up, then ducked into a claustrophobic shaft barely three feet high. Saul did not hesitate, but dove in after him.

Saul's breath and the sound of his flesh on the brick came bouncing back at him, as loud and intimate as if they existed only in his head. He stumbled, mud 104.

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smearing his legs, careering along the tube in a messy, effective fas.h.i.+on.

His nose hit wet cloth. King Rat had stopped suddenly.

Saul peered over King Rat's shoulder.

'What is it?' he hissed.

King Rat jerked his head. He raised his hand, pointing perfunctorily.

Something moved in the flat, leaden light. Two small creatures edged backwards and forwards uneasily in the brick warren. They crept a few ineffectual inches in one direction, then in another, without once taking their eyes from the figures before them.

Rats.

King Rat was quite still. Saul hovered, bewildered.

One rat stood on either side of the dirty water. They moved in concert, forward together, backwards together, a tentative dance, staring at King Rat.

'What's happening?' whispered Saul.

King Rat did not answer.

One of the rats scuttled forward and sat up on its hind legs, six feet in front of King Rat. It paddled its front legs aggressively, squeaked, bared its teeth. It returned to all fours and crept a little further forward, baring its teeth, clearly afraid but apparently angry, contemptuous.

The rat appeared to spit.

King Rat suddenly barked in outrage and lurched 105.

forward, his arm outstretched, but the two rats had bolted.

King Rat picked himself silently out of the muck and continued along the tunnel.

'Hey, hey, hold on,' said Saul in amazement. King Rat kept moving. 'What the f.u.c.k was that all about?'

King Rat kept moving.

'What's going on?' shouted Saul.

'Stow it!' screamed King Rat without turning. He crept on. 'Not now,' he said more quietly. 'That's the seat of my sorrow. Not now. Just you wait till I get you home.'

He disappeared round a corner.

Saul became lulled by the sewers. He kept King Rat in his sights, losing himself in the damp brick convolutions. More rats pa.s.sed them, but no more taunted them as the first two had seemed to do. They stopped when they saw King Rat, and then quickly ran.

King Rat ignored them, winding through the complex at a constant quick trudge.

Saul felt like a tourist. He investigated the walls in pa.s.sing, reading the mildew on the bricks. He was hypnotized by his own footsteps. Time pa.s.sed as a succession of brick tributaries. He was ignorant of the cold and intoxicated by the smell. Occasional growls of traffic filtered through the earth and tar above, to yawn through the cavernous sewers.

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Presently King Rat stopped in a tunnel through which the two explorers had to crawl. He turned to face Saul, a trick which looked impossible in the tiny s.p.a.ce. The air was thick with the smell of p.i.s.s, a particular p.i.s.s, a strong, familiar smell, the smell which permeated King Rat's clothes.

'Righto,' murmured King Rat. 'So have you clocked your whereabouts?' Saul shook his head. 'We're at the crossroads of Rome-vill, the centre, my very own conjunction, under King's Cross. Hold your tongue and p.r.i.c.k up your ears: hear the trains growling'} Got the map in your bonce? Learn the way. This is where you've to get to. Just follow your I Suppose. I've marked out my manor nice and strong, you can sniff it out from anywhere underground.' And Saul felt suddenly sure that he could find his way there, as easy as breathing.

But he looked around him, and could see only the same bricks, the same dirty water as everywhere else.

'What,' he ventured slowly, 'is here?'

King Rat pushed his finger against his nose and winked.

'I set myself down anywhere I b.l.o.o.d.y fancy, but a king wants a palace.' As he spoke, King Rat was busying himself with the bricks below him, running a long fingernail between them, creating a rising worm of dirt. He traced a jagged square of brick whose uneven sides were a little less than two feet long. He 107.

dug his fingernails under the corners and pulled what looked like a tray of bricks out of the floor.

Saul whistled with amazement at the hole he had uncovered. The wind played over the newly opened hole like a flute. He looked at the bricks King Rat held. They were an artifice, a single concrete plug with angled edges under the thin veneer oi brick, so that it sat snug and invisible in the tunnel floor.

Saul peered into the opening. A chute curved away steeply out of sight. He looked up, King Rat was hugging the lid, waiting for Saul.

Saul swung his legs over the lip of the chute, and breathed its stale air. He pushed himself forward with his b.u.m and slid under the tight curve, greased with living slime.

A breakneck careering ride and Saul was deposited breathless into a pool of freezing water. He spluttered and gobbed, emptying his mouth of the taste of dirt and squeezing his eyes clear. When he opened them, he stopped quite still, water dripping from his open mouth.

The walls stretched out away from each other so suddenly and violently it was as though they were afraid of one another. Saul sat in the cold pool at one end of the chamber. It swept out, a three-dimensional ellipse, like a raindrop on its side, ninety feet long, with him dumbstruck at the thin end. Reinforced brick ribs striped trie walls of the chamber and arched overhead: cathedral architecture, thirty feet high, like 108.

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the fossilized belly of a whale long entombed under the city.

Saul stumbled from the pool, took a few short steps forward. To either side the room dipped a little, creating a thin moat drawing its water from the pool into which the chute had deposited Saul. Every few feet, just above the moat, were the circular ends of pipes disappearing, Saul supposed, into the main sewer above.

Before him there was a raised walkway, which climbed an incline until at the opposite end of the chamber it was eight feet from the floor, and there was the throne.

It faced Saul. It was rough, a utilitarian design sculpted with bricks, like everything under the ground. The throne-room was quite empty.

Behind Saul something hit the water. The report leisurely explored the room. King Rat came to stand behind Saul.

'Ta very much, Mr Bazalgette.'

Saul turned his head, shook it to show that he did not understand. King Rat scampered up the walkway and curled into the chair. He sat facing Saul, one leg thrown over a brickwork arm. His voice came as clear as ever to Saul's ears, although he did not raise it.

'He was the man with the plan, built the whole maze in the time of the last queen. People owe him their flush c.r.a.ppers, and me... I can thank him for my underworld.'

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'But all this ...' breathed Saul. This room ... why did he build this room?'

'Mr Bazalgette was a canny gent.' King Rat snickered unpleasantly. 'I had a few whids, burnt his lugholes, told him a few tales, sights I'd seen. We had a conflab about him and his habits, not all of which were unknown to me.' King Rat winked exaggeratedly. 'He was of the opinion that these tales should remain undisclosed. We came to an arrangement. You'll not find this here burrow, my cubby-hole, on any plans.'

Saul approached King Rat's throne. He squatted on all fours in front of the seat.

'What are we doing here? What do we do now?' Saul was suddenly weary of following like a disciple, unable to intervene or shape events. 'I want to know what you want.'

King Rat stared at him without speaking.

Saul continued. 'Is this about those rats?' he said. There was no answer.

'Is this about the rats? What was that about? You're the king, right? You're King Rat. So command them. I didn't see them showing any tribute or respect. They looked pretty p.i.s.sed off to me. What's this about? Call on the rats, make them come to you.'

There was no sound in the hall. King Rat continued to stare.

Eventually he spoke. 'Not... yet.'

Saul waited.

110.

1.'I won't... yet. They're still... narked... with me. They'll not do what I tell them just yet.'

'How long have they been ... narked?'

'Seven hundred years.'

King Rat looked a pathetic figure. He skulked with his characteristic combination of defensiveness and arrogance. He looked lonely.

'You're .. . not the king at all, are you?'

'/ am the king!' King Rat was on his feet, spitting at the figure below him. 'Don't dare talk to me like that! I'm the King, I'm the one, the cutpurse, the thief, the deserter chief!'

'So what's going on}' yelled Saul.

'Something . .. went.. . wrong . .. Once upon a time. Rats've long memories, see?' King Rat thumped his head. 'They don't forget stuff. They keep it all in the noggin. That's all. And you're involved, suns.h.i.+ne. This is all tied up with the one that wants you dead, the cove that b.u.mped off your f.u.c.king dad.'

f.u.c.king dad, said the echoes for a long time afterwards.

'What... who ... is it?' said Saul.

King Rat looked balefully at him with those shadow-encrusted eyes.

'The Ratcatcher.'

PART THREE.

LESSONS IN.

RHYTHM AND.