The carriage of the Northern Line tube rattled furiously as it made its hidden progress underneath the streets and houses of London. Above the surface it was fresh and overcast, but down in the tunnels the air was stiflingly hot and the strip lighting hurt Jonathan’s eyes. Although it was mid-morning, and all the commuters had long since reached their offices, the carriage was still jammed with people, and his face was in an uncomfortable proximity to an overweight tourist’s armpit. Jonathan glanced up at the tube map on the wall of the carriage, to count how many stops he had to go until he could escape the arid prison.
The piece of paper he had taken from Alain’s study was folded safely into his jeans’ pocket. From time to time he slipped his fingers into the pocket to reassure himself that it was still there. The instant he had read it he had realized where he had to go. Jonathan knew his father well enough to know that he would not be able to pick up The Darkest Descent at his local library. It would not be sitting alongside cheap murder mysteries and romance novels. More than likely, Alain had been the only person who had ever wanted to read the book. No, there was only one place where he would be able to discover its secrets: the British Library.
If there was one aspect of life that Alain had tried to teach his son about, it was reading. Jonathan had many early memories of sitting in his dad’s lap with a big book on his knees, spelling out words and laughing at the funny pictures. Alain seemed more at ease dealing with unreal worlds and fantasy stories than real life. He took Jonathan on regular visits to libraries across London, and made sure that he was a registered reader at all of them. They would sit side-by-side on one of the long reading desks, Jonathan copying the careful way in which his dad turned the pages. In all those years it was the closest they ever got to each other.
The tube came to a sudden, jarring halt, knocking Jonathan off balance and sending him flying into the overweight tourist. The man barked out in surprise, only just managing to steady himself.
“Sorry,” Jonathan mumbled.
The tourist glared at him, and resumed staring into space.
After the longest ten-minute journey of Jonathan’s life, the carriage pulled into King’s Cross tube station. Those who disembarked were herded like livestock towards three ticket barriers, not nearly enough for the amount of people trying to get through. With a great amount of pushing and swearing, the crowd fought to be at the front of the swell. Jonathan waited at the back, brimming with impatience. With his dad in hospital, it was down to him to carry on Alain’s desperate quest, even though Jonathan wasn’t sure what he was looking for, or what secrets awaited him in the pages of The Darkest Descent. All he did know was that he was close, and that he was determined to find some answers.
With its complex series of twisting tunnels and staircases, King’s Cross Underground resembled a living organism. Humans flowed through its veins and arteries like red blood cells, racing and colliding against one another. Whichever platform they were heading for, whether it was for the Victoria Line, the Metropolitan Line or the Piccadilly Line, they all seemed to know exactly where they were going, always kept their gaze fixed directly in front of them. Jonathan cut into the slipstream of people and circled up and out of the station.
It felt good to be outside, despite the fact that it had started to spit with rain. In front of the station there was some major sort of construction work going on, and parts of the road had been dug up. The sound of drilling rang in Jonathan’s ears. With all the barriers and contradictory pedestrian signs it wasn’t obvious which was the way to the library, but Jonathan knew the route. He went right past St Pancras Station, King’s Cross’s gloomy older brother, narrowly avoided getting knocked down crossing Midland Road, and found himself at his destination.
The British Library was a modern, redbrick building on a corner of Euston Road. Jonathan wandered past a coffee shop and entered the front yard. Around him there were raised, neatly-clipped hedgerows and large rocks balanced at even intervals on plinths. There was an overwhelming atmosphere of order and calm about the layout. To his left, a big bronze statue of a crouching man peeped over the hedges at Jonathan. Behind the library’s gently sloping roof, the gothic tower of St Pancras Station loomed over it, trapped in a cage of scaffolding.
Jonathan trudged through the yard, and through the automatic doors that marked the entrance to the library. Inside it was bright and spacious. He was in the foyer area of a vast main hall. In front of him a network of floors and staircases rose up to the roof, like the cross-section of an ants’ nest. To his left, a large painting slashed with vivid colours stretched across the wall. Somewhere in the hall, a recording of African tribal music was playing, and the noise of the drums drowned out the chattering of the people around him. If anything, the scene resembled a posh department store more than a library.
Jonathan went straight up the narrow escalator to the first floor, and then wandered past a giant glass bookcase filled with old books that made him think of home. The reading room was tucked away in the left hand corner of the first floor. The librarian at the front desk smiled in recognition when she saw him.
“Hello, Jonathan. Where’s your dad?”
“Hi, Jenny. He’s ill again. But there’s this book that I really need to read for school, and I can’t find it anywhere else.”
“You know you’re too young to come in on your own.”
“Come on, Jenny. I’m always here. And it’s only one book!”
The librarian frowned, and then leaned forward and said in a whisper, “OK. This once. But I’m going to get in terrible trouble if anything goes wrong.”
Jonathan grinned. “It’s a library! What can go wrong?”
He moved on past the desk, and found himself a seat in a secluded corner of the reading room. There was something very particular about the place – the low ceiling, the muted lighting, the smell of the carpet – that brought back memories of the time Jonathan had spent here watching his dad read in silent admiration. Within these walls it had almost been possible to pretend that they had a normal father–son relationship. He shook his head. There was no time for that sort of thing now.
Getting books from this library wasn’t as simple as pulling them off the shelves. Jonathan had to type the name of the book he wanted and his seat number into one of the banks of computers installed near the reading desks. Then the librarians would fetch it up from the store. Jonathan liked to imagine that deep in underground London, there was a vast labyrinth of books, cavern after cavern, which librarians searched with powerful torches and weapons. When his book had been retrieved, a light would flick on at his reading desk. There was no way of knowing how long that would be. Until then, he would just have to wait. Jonathan sat back in his chair and felt himself dozing off.
He awoke with a start. Since he had fallen asleep the reading room had filled up, and every available space around him had been taken. He hoped that he hadn’t been snoring. The light on his desk was on, and Jonathan went up to the main desk to collect the book. The elderly librarian looked up sharply when he heard his request, and placed a black, unassuming volume on the counter. Then he opened a register and handed Jonathan a pen.
“You’ll have to sign here.”
“I’ve never had to do this before.”
The librarian said nothing; merely tapped the page with his pen. Only three signatures had been entered into the register, the earliest entry a Horace Carmichael back in 1942. Jonathan added his name to the list and headed back to his seat. The librarian silently watched him go.
Now that it was in his hands, Jonathan felt the excitement building within him. Resisting the urge to go straight to the page number his dad had written down, he leafed through the book’s pages. According to the introduction, The Darkest Descent had been written by a man called Raphael Stevenson, who in Victorian times had been a famous explorer. He had spent the early parts of his life travelling round distant corners of the earth, meeting foreign tribes and fighting off wild animals. However, in his mid-forties Stevenson had gone insane, and he had been committed to a lunatic asylum. The page that Alain had referenced came towards the end of the book, where the writing started to become strange and evasive:
On returning from my travels in the Indian subcontinent, I succumbed to a dull lethargy that left me lying dazed and listless in my bed for days on end. At first I believed that I had caught some kind of foreign virus, but then I realized that, instead, my life was merely lacking the day-to-day excitements and dangers that I had experienced abroad. One foggy evening I resolved to raise myself from my slumber and spend my nights in search of . . . darkness.
My night-time wanderings took me deeper into the black heart of London, where women stood cackling like fowl outside public houses and men hid in doorways with evil intent. More than once I owed a debt of gratitude to my stout walking stick. However, after a period of time I became more accustomed to the nefarious character of the area, and felt able to speak to its denizens.
At first my clothing and demeanour attracted suspicion, but gradually people began to open up to me. I spent shilling after shilling buying drinks in dirty gin palaces, trying to extract information from the lowest and most shameful creatures in London.
But whenever I would bring up the subject of darkness, and its whereabouts, they would share a meaningful glance and fall silent. Sometimes one of them would start to speak, only to be quietened by the others. The more people I talked to, the more I became convinced that there was some sort of evil wasteland here in our very capital, the glittering cornerstone of the British Empire.
My ceaseless probings were yielding no results, and I was on the verge of ending my quest when I met a young street-walker called Molly in a seedy part of Clerkenwell. She responded positively to my gentle words, and promised to show me the way to an area of London she swore I could never before have witnessed.
Our journey was a haphazard one, taking account of all manner of loops and changes of direction. When I questioned her about it she looked up with serious eyes and told me that we were following the path of the River Fleet. The River Fleet! A foul and noxious tributary that had been bricked over decades beforehand, such was the unsavoury character of its grim waters. I asked Molly how she could still follow its course, and she replied “I can feel it rushing through my veins”.
As we walked briskly down to the River Thames, her mood suddenly changed, and she became very agitated, begging me to turn back and go home. I remained resolute, and we came out under the shadow of Blackfriars Bridge, where the Fleet flowed into the Thames. The river was at low tide, and we climbed down to the riverbed, where Molly showed me the yawning gateway to darkness. She fell to her knees sobbing, pleading with me not to pass through it, but my mind was made up. Had I known what I know now, I would have listened to her. . .
Jonathan clenched his fist. This was what Alain had been looking for! And now he had found it too. He scribbled the details down on to a piece of paper.
At the desk next to him, a woman sighed loudly as she turned over the page of her book. She was dressed in an all-white trouser suit, with her hair dyed a vibrant purple. When Jonathan turned to look at her, she caught his eye and smiled. He stared back, entranced by the white pallor of her skin. Her smile broadened, and she looked conspiratorially left and right before leaning forward and offering her hand. There was something very familiar about her, but the scent of her perfume haunted Jonathan’s nostrils, disrupting his train of thought.
“I’m Marianne,” she whispered. “My book is very boring.”
“Um, I’m Jonathan,” he replied. There was a pause. She appeared to be waiting for him to say something. “Why don’t you read something else, then?”
“Nice to meet you, Jonathan. I would take out another book, but it takes so long to order one, and I have to go soon. Is your book interesting?”
He shrugged.
“Can I have a look at it?”
It was getting darker outside, and the rain was now beating out a thunderous rhythm on the window. There was an alarm bell ringing at the back of Jonathan’s mind, telling him to be careful. He wasn’t sure that giving the woman his book was necessarily a good idea, but for some reason he was desperate not to disappoint her.
“Be careful. It’s very old.”
She took the book from his hands, frowning at the weight of it. “And heavy.” She sniffed the front cover. “Smelly too.”
Jonathan giggled. He really wasn’t feeling himself. Maybe it was something to do with her perfume, which had a very sweet odour to it. At the next seat, Marianne carefully read the title of the book out loud.
“The Darkest Descent. I think your book definitely is more interesting than mine. What a funny title. Why did you get this one out?”
Jonathan had to stop himself from blurting the answer out loud. “I . . . my teacher told us to read it. It’s part of our history coursework.”
She narrowed her eyes playfully. “Jonathan, you’re not lying to me, are you? That’s very rude, especially to a stranger. You should never lie to strangers, you know.”
He shrugged again. Maybe it was time to get out of here. She had caught sight of the note he had made and was staring intently at it.
“What have you written down there? Something else for your ‘teacher’, no doubt. Why don’t you let Marianne have a little peek at it?”
“I have to go.”
Jonathan tried to rise, but Marianne grabbed his wrist. He was surprised by how firm her grip was. He would have shouted out, but she was murmuring calming words under her breath, and he didn’t feel that scared, not really, and he might as well sit down next to the pretty lady with the purple hair for a little while longer.
“That’s better, isn’t it?” she cooed in his ear. “Now, let’s have a look at that note.”
Jonathan looked on dreamily as she reached across and unfurled the scrap of paper. “A crossing point? You really have been naughty, lying to me. You’ve been reading about Darkside, haven’t you? Tell Marianne what you know about Darkside, little one.”
He giggled again, his head swimming. “It’s some kind of weird place, or something,” he said. “Dunno really.”
Marianne clapped her hands together in delight. “Well, you’re going to find out! You’re going to Darkside, Jonathan! And believe me, you’ll have much more fun going with us than on your own. It can be a bit dangerous there sometimes. It’s good to have company.”
Jonathan allowed himself to be pulled up out of his seat and led out of the reading room. Marianne was holding his hand tightly, and walking briskly towards the steps leading down the main entrance.
“Where we going?” he slurred.
“Sssh. . . We’re going to meet my friends Humble and Skeet, and then we’re going for a little drive. You see?”
There were two men standing at the foyer at the front of the hall, one much taller and more still than the other. Marianne gave them both an enthusiastic wave. The smaller man jumped about in response.
The last remaining spark of Jonathan’s consciousness was urging him to run, but his legs were betraying him, and he felt powerless to move away from Marianne. They took slow, deliberate steps down the staircase, and Jonathan realized that the woman was worried he was going to fall over. He tried to concentrate on keeping his footing. After all, he didn’t want to let her down. . .
A man walking in the opposite direction stumbled on the step, knocking into Marianne. She cursed, losing her grip on Jonathan’s arm. Suddenly the link between them had been broken, and he could feel his head clearing a little. He was in danger – he had to move. Jonathan pelted away up the staircase, beyond Marianne’s despairing lunge, skidded round a corner and disappeared from view.
He had no idea where he was going. All he knew was that he had to get as much distance between himself and that strange woman as possible. Jonathan flew past the coffee shop on the first floor, ignoring the stares of the people sitting there. He headed up another staircase, taking two steps at a time. From somewhere there was a shout, whether from a librarian or Marianne he wasn’t sure. He didn’t look behind him to check.
His head felt better now. It felt like Marianne had put some sort of spell on him, but Jonathan knew that wasn’t possible. One thing was clear, though: she had mentioned a place called Darkside. His dad had been on to something, and now Jonathan could pick up the trail.
He carried on up the staircase until it came out on to the top floor. Though the bustle and chatter from the main hall carried up here, there was no one to be seen. Slowing down to a walk, Jonathan went over to the front edge of the walkway and looked down. From up here, everything in the main hall seemed normal. Knots of schoolchildren and students talked and laughed together, while others sat down in the comfy seats scribbling into notepads or typing on laptops. Jonathan strained to catch a glimpse of Marianne. She was standing casually by the entrance, playing absent-mindedly with a strand of her hair. The two men were nowhere to be seen. Suddenly she looked up in Jonathan’s direction, and he pulled away from the ledge.
There was no guarantee that he was still safe. For all he knew, the two goons could be heading up towards him. And there was only one exit from the library that he knew about, and currently Marianne was standing right in front of it. Jonathan supposed that he could ask one of the librarians for help, but he didn’t fancy his chances of explaining his problem. Adults tended not to trust him, and he doubted that the kidnapping story would be swallowed that easily: “You see, there’s this woman who puts some kind of spell on you. . .” No, that wasn’t going to work. There didn’t even seem to be a fire alarm he could press.
On the far corner of the walkway, Jonathan caught sight of the smaller henchman reaching the top floor. He sniffed the air eagerly with his long nose, his jittery movements turning in Jonathan’s direction. Well, that settled it. He was going to have to do something. Moving quickly again, he rushed past the toilets and towards the bright shelter of a reading room, with the inscription “Maps” lit up above the doorway. As he moved towards it, the other henchman reached the top of the staircase on Jonathan’s side in a calm, regular stride.
By the side of the entrance, a sign informed readers that neither pencils nor bags were allowed in the Map Room. A hint of a smile appeared on Jonathan’s lips.
In the foyer, Marianne anxiously scanned the top floor for any sight of a commotion. It had looked like things were going as smoothly as they had in Trafalgar Square . . . and then that fool had knocked into her. She swore under her breath. Now she had to trust that Humble and Skeet could flush the boy out without alerting the authorities. It was a miracle that they hadn’t been noticed yet. Marianne knew that her special perfume could deflect attention for a certain amount of time, but not with all this running around. Even now, she noticed a frown on the face of one of the library staff, as if he was trying to remember something he had forgotten.
Then she saw Jonathan moving down the escalator, with a librarian holding him firmly by the arm. He was grinning triumphantly. Humble and Skeet followed several paces behind him, helpless onlookers. At the sight of this procession a security guard moved towards them, but the librarian shook her head.
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” she said wearily.
“All this because of a pencil?” Jonathan protested. “I can’t believe you’re throwing me out just because I was carrying a stupid pencil!”
“You were threatening to colour in the maps,” the librarian replied. “Priceless antique maps. That’s why we’re throwing you out. We’ll have to confiscate your reader’s card as well.”
Jonathan gave an exaggerated sigh, then handed over the card. He nodded briskly at Marianne, and then headed out through the doors, upon which he broke into a breakneck run. The librarian turned to Marianne. “Kids. I don’t know what parents these days are thinking of, bringing them up to be like that.”
Marianne nodded sympathetically. The librarian sighed again, and then began trudging back to the map room. As soon as she was out of sight, the shorter man came buzzing up to her.
“You want Skeet to follow the puppy?”
“No need.” Marianne looked out at the glowering sky. “We know where he’s going already.”