Lempriere's Dictionary (84 page)

Lemprière felt the thick cable of muscle ripple up his back and curl in a whiplash that cracked in the base of his brain. A tiny orange glow turned yellow then incandescent white, growing until the soundless explosion of white light filled everything then faded and fell back and he was flying through the earth, his body denser and harder than the surrounding stone and rocks which he pulverised as he drove with irresistible force deeper beneath the surface. He could neither see, nor taste nor hear nor smell, only feel as tilting beds of limestone split and shattered in his wake. He felt broad curves and undulating swathes above and below as he shrugged off deflections from the synclines and anticlines of the sloping stone and punched through the throws and hades of its fault-planes. His head was diamond, his limbs were tempered steel. He felt the earth rippling behind him and he knew it was Septimus. He neither stopped nor turned. He sliced through veins of lead sheathed in calcite and smashed fossil beds, leaving crinoid sea-lilies and petrified coral as dust. Slick cold clay red with oxides slid down his sides as one after the other he pierced the strata. Water dripped and trickled about him in the fissures and spongeworks of the water table. He felt its resurgent jets spray up and hiss off his body as
steam. He was white-hot. Striated marbles, dolomites and periclase crumbled like chalk as he penetrated further past shale beds, boulder chokes and thick plates of mudstone, pockets of firedamp and wells of dead air, beyond the dripping phreatic zone into a granitic darkness that seemed to go on and on until he hardly knew if he moved at all. His descent was slowing, the rock becoming harder and more and more resistant. Dust ground into his sides. The rippling presence behind him was gone. He realised he was caught fast in the rock. He felt its mass all around him, thousands upon thousands of tons which began to stir and then to press against his skin, his face and eyes. He was alone. It was dark. He was trapped.

Lemprière opened his eyes and at first he thought it was true. He was lying in dust, very dry and fine as flour. It was dark. He was alone. He bent his neck and a dull pain spread across his shoulders then up into his skull. His mouth tasted foul. He put his hands to his face and found his spectacles still in place. His body was laid out with his feet and head slightly raised by the curvature of a tunnel. He was underground. As he grew more conscious, he realised that the darkness was not absolute. If he put his hand up to his face, he could count the fingers. A diffused light drifted in the gloom, its source obscure, showing him that he lay in a tunnel which curved and twisted away in both directions. Lemprière pulled himself upright and sat quietly, thinking on what he should do now.

Septimus had betrayed him from the first day in Skewer’s office. Casterleigh was his father’s murderer, and his grandfather’s perhaps, and his father’s before him. Casterleigh was one of the Cabbala, the refugees from Rochelle. Together with Septimus (one of them too? A hired hand?) they had pulled him this way and that like a puppet. And he had believed it all: his father’s death, the woman in the pit at the De Veres’, at the Manufactory, believed everything as he forced his mad constructions on the killings. Actaeon, Danae, Iphigenia and then himself as Paris, who in his own words “fought with little courage,” whose infatuation brought the siege to Troy and the massacre to its people. Perhaps his courage had been slight. Perhaps he might have seen the truth for all its trappings a little sooner. But he was not Paris. It was more than infatuation.

The air in the tunnel was warm and still. Even with his spectacles he could make out only the most general contours and the strange light was very dim. He fancied he saw a darker form some yards to his left. The ache in his head was a dull throb. He began to crawl through the dust towards the figure but, as soon as he moved, the whole vista disappeared in a dense black cloud. The dust was so fine, the least disturbance sent up great billowing plumes and he coughed as it bit the back of his throat, which sent
up more clouds. The powder swirled around him, blinding and choking him. He stopped and sat very still with his eyes closed for some minutes. When he opened them the dust had settled and the faint light had returned. He brushed gingerly at the fine coating on his face. The light was yellower than before, and brighter too. He saw that the dark form rested in the tunnel and made a shape similar to his own. The light grew stronger and he might have made a clearer identification then, but as he looked into the gloom he saw small billowing waves of powder roll around the curve of the tunnel. Someone was approaching, carrying a lamp which was all but engulfed by the particles sent up by his or her footfalls. And presently he could hear these too, soft regular thuds in the dust. The lantern moved closer and closer. The screen of dust advanced and Lemprière was engulfed once more. His eyes watered and his nostrils were clogged. The dust was a dry black fog and the lantern swayed nearer until it hung directly over him. Miasma. The soft footfalls stopped. He tried to speak but coughed instead. The lantern hung there in silence. Gradually, the dust settled once more and Lemprière was able to look up. He had expected, perhaps, Septimus. Or Casterleigh, or even Juliette. The face he recognised was none of these. If he had thought of all the people who might conceivably find him in this place, the man he greeted now would not have appeared amongst them. Yet it was the man who had found him wandering in the fields above Blanche Pierre an age ago and a world away, the day of the killing by the pool on Jersey. And it was the man whom his father had set out to visit that day, whom he had never reached, whom had known Charles would call that day, the last day of summer.

‘Jake!’ he said as the face emerged from the dust, yellow in the lamp light, quietly looking down at him and unsurprised.

‘Jaques,’ said Jaques, as he bent to help Lemprière to his feet.

There were questions, certainly there were large questions to be asked now and yet Lemprière did not ask them. As they walked through the twisting pasages and vaulted caverns of the Beast his queries would die on his lips, as though Jake’s mere presence here was a self-indictment which overtook and answered everything. How else could he be here, unless….

But now, with the dust settling around them both, it was the dark form he had glimpsed before which held his tongue. In the light from the lantern it emerged as a human figure lying across the tunnel ten yards away from him. He moved towards it slowly. Black powder swirled up to his waist in billowing layers, covering the corpse as he drew near. Lemprière stood over the still figure and waited for the cloud to settle. As the layers grew thinner and fell back, a face rose up like a drowned man’s rising too late to the surface; he saw white teeth and lips drawn back tight and
thin as ribbons. The eyes were shrivelled to peas and the skin pulled tight over the skull as though the arid tunnel had leached the water from the corpse and left only skin dry as paper stretched over porcelain bones.

The cadaver had been laid out with its limbs splayed, still in its clothes. Lemprière could make out tufts of white hair, a kind of ruff about the neck and the buttons of a coat, but the clothes were dry as their wearer and the two were barely distinguishable now. Lemprière thought of the rage of Asiaticus which he had taken for empty rhetoric, and the wild talk of his ancestor, reported by Thomas de Vere. He looked into the face of the corpse and knew that those emotions had found the same end here in the dark, alone. They had found François, or he had found them. They had killed him and left him here. Lemprière looked down at his ancestor and wondered if the same fate awaited himself.

‘John,’ Jaques called to him. ‘There are matters to be settled.’ Lemprière glanced once more at his ancestor, then turned to the man who stood waiting for him.

‘You are one of them, Jake, are you not? You are one of the Nine.’

‘I am,’ Jaques replied. ‘Just as you are, John.’

Nazim knelt amidst the wreckage of the trap door and looked down. A long vertical shaft descended into the darkness. He saw that the sides of the shaft were bricked for the first twenty feet or so and thereafter they had been cut from solid rock. An iron ladder was set into the bricks. Nazim replaced the crowbar in his cloak and drew a short knife from its sheath, gripping it between his teeth. He checked his pockets for candles and matches then took a piece of splintered wood and dropped it down the shaft. He was able to count to six before a muffled thud echoed up the shaft. Warm dry air rose up from the opening and mingled with the more humid vapour in the room. Nazim pulled his hat on tight, then swung himself over the lip of the shaft to begin the descent.

The shaft was narrow and seemed to reach down forever. The iron rungs went on and on. Above him, the entrance shrank to the size of a penny and still the shaft went down. He paused to draw breath and felt his heart thud in his chest. When he looked down, he saw only darkness. Somewhere, down there, they were waiting for him. He went on, hand
over hand, further into the depths. His feet found a rhythm and moved steadily down the rungs. His teeth clenched about the knife. Several minutes passed. Then suddenly he seemed to slip and the rungs were gone. He was hanging in space. His legs were swinging, then kicking against the side of the shaft before he could pull himself up and find the last rung once again. He looked up and saw the top of the shaft as a pin prick of light. Below him, nothing. Nazim crooked his arm around the rung and ferreted in his pocket for the matches. As he pulled them out, his weight shifted, his foot slipped out and he had to grab for the rung again. He pulled himself back onto the ladder and cursed. He had dropped the matches. Nazim rested there a few moments and considered what to do next. After a few seconds’ thought, he tensed his legs, let go of the ladder and jumped into darkness.

As he had guessed he would, he fell three or four feet and landed safely. The ladder had stopped a few feet short of the bottom of the shaft. He was standing on a slope and realised that the shaft dropped into the side of a much larger tunnel. His matches had come to rest where they fell and he was about to light the candle when he noticed that he could see two faint shapes. His hands. The absolute darkness lightened further as his eyes searched the gloom. A very faint glow seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, from the rock itself. The tunnel was several times his height in diameter. Its sides curved up and around him, ringed with thick ribs of petrified muscle which formed slight troughs between one another. He found that his stride matched their intervals and began to walk comfortably over the humped ridges, thinking that Le Mara’s stride would match them by the same token.

His senses sharpened as he moved through the tunnel. He could see perhaps twenty yards ahead of him. After a minute or more, he noticed a gradual incline as the tunnel began to rise and soon after his path was blocked by a mass of crudely buttressed planking. The barrier extended to the roof of the cavern but the wood was dry and brittle. Nazim pulled the crowbar from his cloak, prised out two of the planks and squeezed himself through the opening. He found himself in a much larger cavern, contiguous with the last as though it had suddenly widened and opened out. He was standing on a long platform of stone seemingly suspended in space. Twenty feet below him a small lake of black water had collected, but the strangest features were the rows of curved and sharpened obelisks that ran in rows to either side of him jutting clear of the water and extending down from the roof, each one thirty feet or more in height and resembling nothing quite so much as huge teeth.

A barrier similar to the first lay twenty yards ahead and Nazim trod gingerly over the tongue to reach it. It was constructed much like the other,
although here the timbers were not dry, but sodden. Nazim began to realise he had made a mistake. He pulled at a plank which disintegrated at his touch to expose a wall of red clay packed behind the timbers. As he watched, the slick red surface bulged slightly then began to glisten as the first water drops forced their way through the plug. Nazim thought of the shaft, the position of Le Mara’s house, the direction he had taken through the tunnel and realised then that he had walked south, underneath Thames Street to the river. The water seeping through the clay plug he had unwisely disturbed was the Thames itself and, as he watched, he saw a steady drip begin to run in a thin trickle down the rotted planks. He turned and began to retrace his steps through the mouth and down the throat of the Beast to the foot of the shaft which he passed and behind him the trickle turned into a fine spray as the clay began to break up. Nazim walked more quickly now, not thinking what lay behind him, only what waited ahead.