Chapter 2: Mollie Remembers Whilst Teal Misses

The ground runs away from Mollie as they both descend. Always down. Her torch throws demons, terrifying monsters and lurking ape men around the walls. All imaginary. Mollie takes comfort from her string, which she spools out behind her as she walks. Indeed she is starting to almost enjoy herself. She has a processing mind. More than most people.  A mind that, right now, remembers and recounts all that she knows of the sewers.

Built 600 years ago by the original inhabitants of Agapanthus, the sewers, as they were still called, had been designed to carry the city’s waste away. After the recycling boom of the late 2030s most waste had been transported to the agricultural sectors. There had been a plan to turn the sewers into a city wide museum, and some parts had been expanded, great halls, antichambers, even grand stair cases, plunging towards the earth’s core. The project, always ambitious, had gone into bankruptcy and the plan had been abandoned. The head of Lilium and Lilium, the architect firm behind the endeavour, ended her days walking from function to function, begging for money to complete her project. Eventually she grew so disillusioned, so legend has it, that she walked into the sewers and never returned. There was little remorse over her death. She had been a very unpleasant woman.

Since then the sewers had been used for all sorts. Entire families used to hide in the depths during the Blitz years. Despite the destruction meters above, the tunnels would have been full of light then. Defiant laughter as well as the tears. The ghosts of the jaunty fiddle players, employed by the mayor of Agapanthus to keep peoples spirits up, were meant to haunt these places. Mollie smiles at the thought of the ghosts. A lot of superstitious fuss by people who refuse to question their own beliefs.   

When the war was reported finished, and troops, battered, tired, but safe were homeward bound the parties continued in the subterranean tunnels.  Great parties, huge grand parties, lit by electric lanterns. Mollie had a photo of the dancers, an antique piece, smiles never fading through the centuries. The photo, Mollie thought, encompassed it all, ball-gowns, Cha Chas, gin in teapots. However this golden age was short lived. As every generation grew up and went about their business visits to the city sewers declined.  

Then the revolution of 23^rd century. A new dawn had meant that people wanted a new way of living. The sewers had become the fortress of the revolution. A base for the guerrilla army to launch attacks upon those living on the surface. They would strike at night. The city’s other inhabitants, either supporters of the ruling party, or those just too dumb and scared to follow the guerrillas would wake every morning to walls of graffiti and burnt governmental buildings. The carnage was always surrounded by dead or dying security guards and revolutionaries. Every few days there would be news of more assassinations. Promising civil servants with bullets in their backs, pompous officials would go to sleep one evening and never awake. The autopsies always concluded that the result of death was the same. Poison.

That had been a dark time for the city. A violent time. Eventually the ruling classes had responded in kind. The mayor at the time, a Lord Scabiosa, had given the order one Thursday afternoon. By Friday morning there were work teams throughout the city, and by evening all manholes, tunnels, cracks, and service points had been concreted over. That had been the end of the revolution. Months later, teams went into the mines, looking for any survivors. What they found down there had been, by their account, horrific. The revolutionaries, always a violent bunch, had taken to eating each other. Corpses were exhibited, complete with bite and scratch marks. As there were no surviving revolutionaries the team’s account could not be verified. However the evidence was there. Since then there had been no more revolutions.

After the massacre the sewers had been abandoned. Indeed, by most members of the city they had been forgotten. The concrete designed to kill the revolutionaries had crumbled. There had been movements over the years to replenish and rejuvenate the subterranean vaults, but with Agapanthus itself crumbling the successive line of mayors decided to concentrate upon the world that saw light. Now the sewers played host to the occasional tramp looking for a dry place to sleep. Even that was infrequent.

And so Mollie remembers. As she walks she journeys through a thousand untold stories. These stories linger in the air, so pregnant with loss and memory that they become almost tactile. Little does Mollie know, but her story, unravelling like her ball of string, is set to be the greatest, and the most memorable of them all.

Like Mollie, Teal has an inquisitive mind. Often he spends his Sundays at the City Library, reading theology, literature, periodicals. But now he is on a mission. He thinks about what lies in front. Not behind. Like Mollie Teal wades through stories. He comes to a chamber. Walls and ceiling stretching away into the gloom. The roof is so high, or rather the floor so low, that the light from his torch cannot pierce against any solid object. Rather it hangs in the darkness, suspended.

Pausing to consult his map Teal is struck by how inaccurate it is. Instead of walking through the middle of the chamber he skirts around the edge, his chalk grating against the rough granite wall. He comes to a hole, a wide hole that used to hold a door. There is nowhere for Teal to chalk. Holding his breath, he scuttles across the entrance, regaining the far wall with a sigh of relief.

For the first time the scale of his undertaking hits him. The darkness stretches on for miles. Miles of empty rooms, halls and chambers, so criss-crossed with tunnels, passageways and gaping holes that it is incomprehensible. The eyes that watch Teal are suspended high above on the roof of the cavernous hall. For a second an arm, huge and tangled in thick, wet hair enters the torch’s pool of light. But Teal, with his eyes firmly located on where he is going, misses it. 

Sam Reeves