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

Chapter 1: And The Match Is Set

After several months of painstaking research Mr Teal was sure of two things. Firstly, the city’s sewage system stretched on for two hundred miles, and secondarily,  there was something down there that shouldn’t be.  Teal’s research had taken him to the furthest extremities of the city’s boundaries, and had involved some pretty unsavoury characters. Accusations about the city’s subterranean inhabitant had been wild and inconclusive, more often than not consisting of drunken glances in the night. But, as Teal had reflected, only that morning, as he sat in congregation, there is no smoke without fire, and no lie without perpetrator.

For Teal was on a corrective mission, of that he was sure. As he descended the Christmas Steps he was filled with a purpose he had never before experienced. A thin film of sweaty expectation clung to his back, cooling him from the midday sun. Teal was aware of his every move; his own aliveness clung to him, shaped him. Yes, Teal felt terribly alive. If all the calculations are correct, he thought, I will create history today. Or rather correct history. Correct, because, if what was down there was what the source said it was, it needed correcting, both for God and for the city.

Teal had found nothing but unreliable witness accounts until the fifth month of his search, when a rather large bank transaction, larger than Teal could really afford, had yielded a promising result. A photograph blurred and stained, and taken from a great height had shown what Teal had expected all along. The impression of a great ape, dog like, crouching low to the ground was unmistakable. Of course, it could just be an escaped primate; there were several zoos in the city. But an unreported escapee living in a sewer? That, Teal had concluded, was unlikely. No Teal had a rather different theory as to the ape’s existence, he believed that the ape had been placed there by God, as a means of testing Teal, and Teal would not leave God wanting. For as the photograph suggested, this was no ordinary ape.  Despite its dog like snout and low sense of gravity the ape was, Teal didn’t like to think about it, horribly human.

Iron railings flashed past, liquid and shimmering and still Mr Teal descends. He knew what he is looking for. The 52^nd manhole cover on Christmas Steps, 49 went by, 50 was completely rusted shut, as was 51 and then. There it was. Inconspicuous in its alcove, but not hidden. Not hidden from the likes of Teal. He looked about him; all was quiet upon the Christmas Steps.

The manhole cover was heavy but manageable. Grunting Teal hoisted it off. It was not a controlled movement, and the clang cut through the afternoon, down the street, and through the rafters of the eyeless houses and shops which leaned over the Christmas Steps. Casting a furtive glance about him, Teal lowered his bulk into the manhole. A ladder. Down down. A rung at a time. He descends, until the heat of the day has been left behind, and all that is left is a cool, sombre darkness.

The feel a city gives changes from street to street. Six miles away from Christmas Steps, at the southernmost extreme of the city, Mollie Corydalis was looking at a reprint of the same photograph that had made Mr Teal so certain. Mollie Corydalis studied biology at the University.  For over three months now she had been gathering data and reading witness accounts about the notion of the missing link. Humans, she believed, were descendants of primates. Yet still the city church insisted on creationism being taught in the three hundred schools it ran. This angered Mollie. Well, she thought, here is an opportunity to prove myself right.

She sipped her coffee, and perused a map of the subterranean city. Mollie had planned an access point. A tunnel, not far from where she now sat, would provide her with her entrance to the sewers. Once in there, she reasoned, the man-ape would be easy to find. Mollie had guessed the creature’s habits, when it fed, when it slept. No doubt the expedition would take one, perhaps two days at the most. She looked from one end of the street to the other. All was quiet. Hoisting her rucksack on to her back she left the café, and walked towards the tunnel. The heat of the midday sun prickled her skin. She hears birds singing, traffic, a lawnmower, as she steps into the gloom and shadow of the tunnel. Sounds that are quickly replaced by that of her own breathing, the splash of her feet in puddles, and the echoes of it all that bounce from the walls. An ape, she thought, proof, proof at last.

A pair of eyes, unbeknown to Mollie, tracks her slow progress through the subterranean tunnels. Six miles away beneath Christmas Steps, another pair of eyes watch Mr Teal as he rummages in his bag for his torch. Both sets of eyes are dark, the pupils dilate to cover the entire iris, leaving a thin, almost invisible, band of grey. Teal has a piece of chalk, scraping his progress as he journeys through the sewers. Mollies has string, which, in two days, a desperate Mr Teal will cut. But not yet. Presently Teal, is governed by certainty. He has a location, not far from here, where he believes the beast feeds. A place where he can spring upon it unawares. Six miles away Mollie has her mind upon a different place, where she is sure the animal sleeps. But the inhabitants of the city sewers, who are neither man nor ape, live in neither place. They feel anxious, cornered by these two wanderers, who journey ever closer to each other, to the deepest part of the sewer and to discoveries which at present, neither of them can quite comprehend.

Sam Reeves