Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones (8 page)

Earl had been working the sewers for nearly three decades. When he made new acquaintances and told them what he did, he would joke that it at least kept him out of the rain. Of course, it didn’t keep him out of the rain at all; if anything other than a light drizzle was forecast they weren’t allowed down to do the job – no matter what the emergency – because of the danger of flash floods.

Methane gas was another hazard, but the detectors were highly effective. As for explosions from the methane, he couldn’t remember a single one in all that time. Even the smell wasn’t quite as bad as people thought. Unless you came across rotting flesh, of course. A larger drowned animal that had been swept in that the rats hadn’t eaten – a cat or a dog maybe. You learnt not to pierce the skin of the carcass, or the putrid liquefied insides would burst out with an evil stench.

No, the biggest danger was slipping. If you slipped, you’d really be in the poo, he would tell the new lads on the job. Being covered in it was one thing, but cutting yourself was quite another. One of his mates had slipped, cut his hand through his glove and not said anything because he’d needed the overtime. They’d rushed him to hospital the next day when he fainted after putting his heavy work-wear on. You could have fried an egg on his forehead, his temperature was that high. It was septicaemia – blood poisoning. Two days later they’d amputated both his arms below the elbow. Two days after that his legs had gone below the knee. Earl didn’t know if he’d want to live after losing that lot. Still, he’d heard through the grapevine that the guy was happy enough. Amazing what people could cope with, he thought.

He gave a couple more jabs with his spade at the solidified mix of yellow-white fat and wet wipes caked on the roof. A particularly large lump of it dropped into the shallow water with a dull splash and he planted his boots on either side of the curved wall as it was carried back towards his mate Derek, who was manning the suction pipe. It stopped moving, so he edged along upstream of it, turned around and hacked at it to break it up. He swept it along with the blade of his spade and nodded over at Derek, seeing the beam of his helmet light dipping as he did so. They tried never to look at each other directly – the beams of their lights were LED these days, and a quick flash was painful on the eyes, and a little blinding. You didn’t want to lose your night vision. Derek acknowledged him with a wave. They’d take a break soon and then swap places to alleviate the monotony and share the hard work. Derek would welcome the chance to get away from the noise of the pump running on the surface.

Earl couldn’t wait to get to the position under the manhole, and to have a tiny patch of sky fifteen feet above him. Something was bothering him today and he couldn’t put his finger on it. He told himself it was the uncanny lack of rats. The myth that you were never more than ten feet from a rat in London was a complete fabrication from the nineteenth century. They weren’t even abundant in the sewers – but they were a constant presence. To have seen none at all this far into a shift was a first for him.

His mind turned over the possibilities. They’d either been poisoned or they’d been killed by a disease. What did he know about rats? Immune to a lot of poisons, and an animal had to be pretty resistant to disease to live in this filth. Rats didn’t get septicaemia when they got cuts, that was for sure.

If the rats had all died, then where were the bodies? He’d seen enough dead rats in his time to know that the carcasses got stuck in eddy currents. They’d crawl onto ledges well above the water when they were sick, and they’d die there. Not one body had he seen today. Why was it bothering him? He’d had nerves on day one of the job, but never since.

He stabbed at the fat with his spade. This was something that had got much worse in the last few years: fat and fancy tissues made of fibre that didn’t break up like toilet paper. Together they were a lethal combination, clogging London’s sewers. The restaurants didn’t care – they just chucked the fat down the drain at the end of every night, and there was nothing to stop them.

It had had one health benefit for himself though: it had made him give up takeaway food. He could see what the doctors were talking about now when they explained that fat clogged up arteries. He might be pushing fifty, but he thought he’d never been fitter, whereas some of his old school friends were diabetic now.

He felt something bang up against the back of his wading boots. The new lad, Arek, was ‘on point’. The use of this military patrol term was their black humour for being the most upstream worker – the one who’d clear enough of a way through for the next man behind if it was really thick.

Arek was a Pole. He was a good worker, and fearless too, but Earl couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to take a job in the London sewers. He could understand the younger ones coming over for jobs where they got to learn the language, like doing office work, or being a barista in a coffee shop. But you never got to say a word when you were down here, and the very nature of the job meant that language was limited. The Inuit might have a hundred words for snow, but there weren’t that many for turds – no matter how much time you spent with them. Once, Earl had tried to make a joke about the fact that you couldn’t polish a turd. When he’d written it out on paper to explain that ‘polish’ and ‘Polish’ had the same spelling but different meanings, Arek hadn’t really got the pun, and Earl had realised that associating the Polish with turds hadn’t been such a great idea in retrospect.

He stepped aside and helped Arek’s lump of fat along with a swish of his spade before turning around again.

Arek was facing upstream, his back to Earl. He saw him hack skilfully at one last big yellow-white mound of fat at shoulder height. It fell in one piece and splashed into the water in front of him. He stepped carefully over it and gave it a shove with the flat of his blade, sending it downstream to Earl, who saw that it was so big it was damming the water behind it. It edged towards him and then stopped, the water and waste flowing over it. There was no sense in shouting over at Arek, who was splashing along the last few yards to an intersection, where the main tunnel split into two gaping black chasms that were tributaries to the section they were cleaning. The one on the right came from Balham and Tooting, and was likely to be the filthier of the two, given the high density of restaurants and takeaways in those locations. It veered off quite sharply compared to the one coming over from Streatham Hill.

Earl saw the beam of his own light wobble and realised he was shaking his head subconsciously. Arek wasn’t just fearless – he was curious with it. No harm in him going off to take a quick look and make a start on the next section. Earl glanced at his watch. Ten minutes until they swapped. He’d tackle Arek’s lump and then finish his own section on the way back downstream. He’d get out in the fresh air for half an hour, have a laugh and a cup of tea with the lads, and then spend the remainder of the shift doing the easy job of manning the suction pipe with a patch of sky over his head. The prospect cheered him no end, and settled his nerves.

He walked carefully up through the sewer to the large chunk of fat and wet wipes. He planted his feet either side of the curved wall and stepped over into the pool of liquid behind it, turned around and hacked it into smaller pieces, swishing them downstream towards Derek. The backed-up pool of sewage rushed past his boots and he felt the little impacts of turds against his heels. He waded back to the end of his section of roof. A few more digs with his spade and he’d be done. Keeping the beam of his light pointing at the roof and away from Derek, he started hacking. Out of one corner of his eye he could see Derek working the remains of Arek’s chunk of fat into the end of the suction pipe. The beam from Arek’s head torch was shining off the walls around him, and getting closer. There was something odd about the angle of the beam – it seemed to be coming from below, rather than head-height. A shadow of his legs was cast upwards. Something bumped into the back of his boots and he looked back over his shoulder.

It was Arek’s helmet.

He wobbled on his feet with the shock, dropped his spade into the water and leaned against the Victorian brickwork of the tunnel wall for support. He looked upstream, expecting the beam of his torch to reveal his colleague a few feet away.

Nothing. Just empty blackness. The beam of his torch could only reveal the entrance to each of the black orifices. There was no disturbance to the flow of the water – no little surges that would indicate a man wading through the current further up.

He began breathing deeply, his heart racing. He kept his head turned upstream at those black holes, primal fear feeding him insane and impossible stories. Keeping the beam of his torch pointing at the unseeable and unknown, he leaned back and slid down the wall slowly to pick up Arek’s helmet, which was bobbing against the side of his left boot. It was a hell of a dangerous practical joke, if it was one – and not to say entirely out of character. He felt around with his right hand, grasped the white helmet and lifted it into his field of vision.

There was a splash of blood on the inside.

He dropped it. It banged against the side of the tunnel and floated off towards Derek, spinning wildly in the current. He lifted the safety catch off the alarm on his radio and hit the red button.

“Derek!” he screamed. “Derek!” His colleague hit the safety cut-off on the pump and the steady thrumming petered out.

He regained his composure. He was the senior man on the job. Arek was in desperate need of help, possibly unconscious and perhaps drowning in the sewage. Earl had had nightmares about that early in his career. He unhooked the radio and lifted it to his mouth. “Man down!” he yelled. He didn’t need to; the surface crew would already have been alerted and the emergency procedure would have begun, and fire and ambulance services would be there in minutes.

Derek picked up Arek’s helmet as it reached him and nestled it into one of the rungs leading up to the manhole. He grabbed the big flashlight and waded over quickly to join Earl, who had regained his composure.

“Nothing!” said Earl. “Come on.”

He led the way as the two of them sloshed their way upstream as quickly as they could towards the two tributary tunnels. There was a wide section of tunnel where they converged, and the current moved slowly, little eddies filled with an assortment of tissues and turds.

“Which way?” asked Derek.

“Right. Balham and Tooting.”

They looked up the tunnel, the beams from their head lights converging with the one from the flashlight Derek was holding. The tunnel twisted round, so they could only see twenty yards into it. All they saw was old brickwork, with yellowish fat and tissue caked around the sides and roof.

“Arek!” shouted Earl into the void. The noise of the single word reverberated and disappeared, leaving only the sound of cascading water.

“You sure he went up that one?”

“’Course!”

“He can’t have gone that far. Not without his light.”

The unspoken questions hung between them in the heavy air of the sewer.
How could he?
Why would he
?

Derek splashed his way over to the entrance of the other tunnel and Earl joined him. This one was straighter, and the three beams of light gave them fifty yards of good visibility, and enough beyond that to be sure that Arek’s reflective vest wasn’t anywhere within a hundred, or a hundred-and-fifty yards. The two men looked at each other.

They went back to the Balham and Tooting tributary and Derek took the lead, keeping his torch stretched out in his left hand to get the most light he could around the right-hand twist of the tunnel. Earl stayed two yards behind, feeling the darkness – the void – clawing at his back. He glanced over his shoulder and caught a flash of the LED from the light of one of the surface crew, who’d come down to provide back-up. It was a relief to know someone was there.

Derek stopped. “Look.”

Earl looked over his colleague’s shoulder and saw Arek’s spade lying in the stream of sewage. They approached the tool, still unable to see more than twenty yards around the tight curve of the tunnel. The brickwork that wasn’t covered in fat glistened in a way he’d not seen before. He reached out and ran his gloved hand over it. It was like mucus – slime. He and Derek looked at each other.

“We have to go on,” said Derek. “Man down.”

Earl reached for his radio and told them they’d found Arek’s spade, but not the man. He advised that another crew needed to insert themselves at the next manhole on the Balham and Tooting tributary. The tunnel straightened out and almost immediately formed a concrete cavern twenty feet to either side, fifteen across and ten high. Two large, modern concrete pipes sat either side of the old Victorian sewer. There were rungs off to one side, and at the top they could just make out a pinhole of light coming from the keyhole in a manhole cover. There was the rumble of heavy traffic on the South Circular. They knew the liquid would be a foot deep in this box junction, and no more. Derek flashed his torch around. There was no body to be seen. They went over to the rungs. They were dry. No one had climbed them.