The Children's Book

soaked and covered in mud, but it was nice to be out in the open, and I put up a respectable time, coming third. I am trying to improve at rugby and have a mass of bruises to show for my efforts. Fawcett Major said my running was creditable but my tactical sense nil. I shall work on the latter. Thank you for sending the story. It makes all the difference. Your loving son, Tom.

The story was an embarrassment. How does a suddenly little boy, deliberately deprived of privacy, read dozens of pages of typed paper, without drawing attention to himself? How and where could he hide? The story was a necessity. Tom reading Tom Underground was real: Tom avoiding Hunter’s eye, Tom chanting declensions, Tom cleaning washbasins and listening to smutty jokes was a simulacrum, a wind-up doll in schoolboy shape.

He went underground. The school was heated by a bellowing and shuddering system of coke-fired radiators. There were coalholes and boiler-rooms down there, accessible from the basement locker rooms. Tom furnished himself in the village on a school outing, with a little oil lamp on a rocking base called a Kelly lamp. He remembered, in the days when he had been Tom, pursuing the hiding boy through the underground pillars and vaulted arches of the South Kensington Museum. Tom was one of those lonely boys who imagines rapidly and easily that he is the only one of his kind in the whole community, that he is in a sense the unique butt of all mockery, bullying and ordinary spite. So it did not occur to him that other desperadoes might have been driven to take refuge here, amongst the shovels and brooms. But he did find traces of previous fugitives—a chalk drawing of a row of hanged boys on gibbets on a wall, a carefully folded travelling rug, and pillow, with a neatly buckled satchel, under a heap of sacking. There must be, or have been, at least one more like him. So he made his hidey-hole in a very cramped, unpleasant corner behind a roaring furnace, which belched out unpleasant fumes. Even other fugitives might not think first of this as a refuge. There he spread a blanket, put on a sweater, lit his Kelly lamp, and read Tom Underground, smearing the typescript with sooty fingers.

The travelling prince had acquired various companions, some human, some inhuman, some of whom had stalked him for days before revealing themselves, some of whom he had himself tracked through burrows and into crannies. One was a mine-spirit, who was of a kind known as gathorns, and whose name seemed to be, like all his kind, Gathorn. He was slender and pale, and could make cobalt-blue light shine from his hair and the tips of his fingers. He described himself as timorous, but in moments of danger showed a tremulous, but real, courage. There was a scurrying salamander-like creature, as long as Tom was tall, like a small dragon on bow legs, with ivory- coloured scales, and crimson eyes like red coals. He had hissed and reared his crest when he saw Tom, but the gathorn had soothed him, and co-opted him to the company. He could always find fresh water, where it trickled down slate or sprang through fissures in the shale. There was a thing that was sometimes there and sometimes not there, which took the form of a huge, transparent tube, rounded at both ends, with eyes and a mouth that appeared and vanished from time to time in random places on its body. It was known as Loblolly and had dropped like a bead of amber into the prince’s hair, and then had swelled and expanded to line a whole cavern. It could flow along the ground, or diminish to a heavy square of jelly that the young prince could carry in his pocket. It warned of the three lethal damps—Fire Damp, Choke Damp, and White Damp—and would spread its own body as an impermeable tissue to prevent these horrors creeping in through cracks and pinholes.

Other beings were met, and neither trusted nor distrusted. Cutty Soams, very jolly, half-mansize, chipping away with a pickaxe in a green and mustard glow, bared to the waist but wearing a ragged green cap and a spiky beard, warning against going further on or deeper down—he would never dare, oh no. He misdirected the Company, sending them left along a level which ended with an impenetrable rock-face. He may or may not have been helping the Enemy. They were aware of spies. Little fluttering bats with eyes like minuscule rubies and diamonds, touching hair with bony fingers, flickering away into shadow. Worms of all shapes and sizes, quick and slow. Dancing lights that they had the sense not to follow. A carved figure on a stone chair, swelling out of the rock.

•  •  •

There was also the Wild Boy. It was possible—Tom in the story entertained the possibility—that the Wild Boy was Tom’s Shadow. He was always glimpsed at a distance, at the other end of a tunnel, running fast. He was ragged and dusty, barefoot and fleeting. Sometimes he turned to wave, mocking or inviting, they did not know, before vanishing into the shadows.

They found him, of course. Hunter and his sidekicks, Blewett and Fitch, stalked through the boiler-room in dressing-gowns and slippers, shining a light into crannies and under ledges and pipes. They probably went on these boyhunts regularly, though this did not occur to Tom, who felt he was Tomallalone, unique, the single object of their mocking venom. Hunter’s dressing-gown was scarlet, wide- skirted, the colour of judges’ robes, with gilded braiding and a gold cord round his manly waist above his purposeful haunches. He had glossy beetle-black slippers, embossed with his crest, which had plumes and portcullises on it. The butts would clean the coal dust off the slippers the next day. Tom remembered, holding his breath, that he had himself performed that task, and was furious with himself for not seeing what it implied. They sauntered past his hiding-place, and he breathed again, and then, of course, they turned, and Hunter said “Let’s just cast an eye behind here—now what have we here, a naughty little newbutt, out of bed, with a little lamp and a filthy heap of paper, and a blanket too, all mod cons. You will see me tomorrow, Wellwood, and I’ll flay your buttocks for you. Now, show me what you’re reading to yourself. Some smutty tale, I’m sure.” He motioned to Blewett to seize the pages. Tom bared his teeth, like a rat, and cowered back, and panted.

“Bum-wad,” said Hunter. “Read it out, Blue, let’s hear what the little swine is masturbating with.”

Blewett read. He read badly, halting and humpy, putting on a false, exaggerated squeak.

Then Gathorn said “We need to go still further in, however dark it is.”

And Tom said “I would give anything, almost, to see the light of day. I am shadowless by torchlight and candlelight, I might as well be shadowless in the sun.”

And the Loblolly hummed a little tune, and said that rats were nearby, he could smell them, thousands of rats, swarming through the tunnel. And Tom said “I am afraid I may never come out of here alive.”

•  •  •

“What sort of crap is this?” said Hunter. “Stories for babies, whining babies who need bedtime pap like this. You won’t forget this in a hurry, Wellwood.”

Tom croaked “Give it back.”

“Did you write it yourself? It’s pretty comprehensive rubbish, isn’t it? And you know what we do with rubbish. We could cut it up for bum-wad. Or we could just chuck it in here,” he said, opening the door of the furnace.

A flame shot up from the surface of the incandescent coke-bed inside the boiler. Blue flames rippled, gold flames flickered, dull red patches sprouted on the exposed lumps. The stench was asphyxiating. Fitch began to cough, and Hunter began to throw Tom Underground, page by page, clump of pages by clump, into the open porthole. The story writhed and shrivelled on its bed of fire. Tom seized his Kelly lamp, which he had turned off, and hurled it at Hunter’s head. It struck his cheek, leaving a bruise and a blister, and poured lamp-oil down the scarlet gown, in dark stains.

“You could be sent away for this,” said Hunter, mopping his cheek with a handkerchief. “You nasty little turd, you could be hurled up in front of the Head, you could be beaten in front of the whole school, you could be