By Martin Pearson
“The British Empire,” declared Reggie Upton, proudly, “is the greatest and most powerful that the world has ever seen. It is rightly called The Empire Upon Which The Sun Never Sets.”
“Pah!” exclaimed Mirielle D’Illay, dismissively. “That is just as well. No one would ever trust an Englishman in the dark.”
Reggie managed to stifle a smile, although his eyes twinkled with merriment. Despite Mirielle’s apparent Anglophobia, the old soldier could not help but like her. He had witnessed her vulnerability in recent weeks, when her husband, Septimus, mysteriously vanished. The patrons of The Squid and Teapot had scoured the island looking for the young man, but to no avail. When Septimus suddenly reappeared after a few days, having no memory of where he had been, Mirielle was torn between anger and relief. This was something that Reggie could understand and empathise with, for these were emotions that had plagued him a dozen or more times during his military career.
“Would you two please stop bickering,” groaned Philomena Bucket, totally misreading the situation. “We all need to focus our attention on what is important, as we are no closer to finding those lads who went missing from The Crow than we were a week ago.”
It was true. The young men seemed to have disappeared completely. While such occurrences were not rare on Hopeless, for five people to simultaneously go missing from the same place, and for no apparent reason, was a little odd.
“Philomena,” said Mirielle, gently, “we have looked everywhere. I cannot help but feel that those boys are a lost cause by now.”
“We shouldn’t give up,” said Philomena, defiantly. “I still think that Durosimi O’Stoat is behind all of this and I’d bet anything that he knows where they are.”
Philomena would have won her wager, for Durosimi did, indeed, know, but he was not likely to tell anyone; not about the hidden cave, or of the zombie-like slaves toiling deep beneath the surface of the island.
For long years, Durosimi had been desperate to find a route to the Underland. He had stumbled upon vague rumours and references to the existence of such a place, but there had been nothing concrete, no first-hand accounts from explorers. Then that blasted Bucket woman, along with Gannicox the Distiller and Middlestreet from The Squid, had found a secret passageway that led to its entrance. Oh, it was so unfair, that this meddling witch should accidentally chance upon the very spot that he, a great and powerful sorcerer, had been seeking for decades. To make matters worse, the foolish woman had recently destroyed the tunnels before he could find a way of getting into them. She had deliberately made the magical cavern inaccessible to anyone, declaring it unsafe.
Durosimi had fumed and brooded over this for months. Of course it was unsafe! It was meant to be unsafe! The Underland was no place for amateurs like the Bucket woman and her cronies to be tramping around. It was meant for the wise, for the initiated – for himself.
It had been Doc Willoughby who had inadvertently sown the seeds of hope that another way might be found to the Underland.
“I overheard the Bucket woman telling Ariadne Middlestreet that she had successfully destroyed the first hundred yards of something she called ‘the west tunnel’,” the Doc had confided, holding out his glass for a refill of whisky. “Although, I must admit, I have no idea what she was talking about. I thought that you might be interested, though.”
Durosimi had found it useful to invite Willoughby to his home occasionally, ply him with copious amounts of alcohol, and listen to the gossip circulating in the Squid.
“Hmm… it might be worthwhile to find out what she meant,” said Durosimi, his offhand tone in direct contrast with the excitement welling up inside him.
Metaphorical wheels were soon set in motion. It had not been too difficult to find a convenient means of ingress into the earth, and from there plot the line leading westward from The Squid and Teapot, to the portal of the Underland. Neither was it difficult for Durosimi to recruit some gullible young men to do the heavy lifting for him. The whole project, however, required great secrecy. Fortunately, Durosimi was very, very good at secrecy.
Of course, young Washwell had proved an annoyance, managing to escape as he did. Still, an annoyance was not necessarily a problem. Durosimi congratulated himself on securing the hidden cave with a cloaking spell, which also served to render his slaves totally unaware of where they were, or why. Except for this small detail, everything seemed to be progressing well.
It was under the cover of foggy darkness, during the few days that fell between the waning of the old moon and the waxing of the new, that Durosimi went to check how the work was progressing. He carried with him a bag containing a few meagre rations; food must be running low by now, and those youngsters would need all of their strength for the task before them.
He wandered deep underground, down the steep pathway to where his slaves toiled. He noted, with satisfaction, that the dim lights he had set into the wall still glowed with an eerie luminescence. Despite this, the all-pervading silence told him that there was something wrong. Upon reaching the cavern where the work was meant to be going on, he found it deserted. The light in here was even poorer than in the passages, so Durosimi lit the lantern he had brought with him and held it aloft. It took a moment or two for his eyes to adjust to the comparative brightness, then he gasped in horror. What he had imagined to be a mound of rocks proved to be a huge toad, towering above him, warty and squat. The toad’s eyes glittered and regarded him with unbridled malevolence.
“You are not welcome here mortal,” it rasped, its wide slash of a mouth leering unpleasantly.
“My workers… what have you done with them?” said Durosimi, his voice trembling.
The toad said nothing, but flicked its long tongue disconcertingly close to Durosimi, deftly relieving him of the bag of food that he was carrying.
Durosimi froze. The next time that tongue came out, it could be the finish of him.
“Be gone, and do not return, unless you wish to join them,” said the toad.
Durosimi cautiously stepped away, not daring to turn his back on the repulsive creature until he was safely out of range of that awful sticky tongue. Then he ran. He ran until he was well clear of the cave, to fall gasping and retching upon the doorstep of his house.
What had those lads unearthed? What was that awful thing?
Well, it was a demon, that was for sure, but none that he had ever heard of. These thoughts rushed through Durosimi’s mind in a torrent. He knew his own limits and decided, there and then, that it would be nothing but folly to go back into the cave. That thing had probably lived down there for years – hundreds of years, or maybe more. Discretion, Durosimi decided, was, on this occasion, the better part of valour.
Deep beneath the surface of the island, the toad stirred. It shook its huge body and, if anyone had been foolish enough to be an onlooker, they would have been more than a little surprised to see it start to shrink, gradually becoming as diminutive and shapeless as a deflated balloon. In that half-light they would have witnessed a figure lifting itself from the rocks around its feet, and casually dust itself down.
“Well, that was fun,” chuckled Trickster, smugly. “It has been far too long since O’Stoat was last put in his place.”
He looked about him at the five young men who stood unmoving in the shadows. They were still zombiefied, Trickster noticed, but there would be no permanent harm. Well… probably not, but that was not his problem.
“Come on,” he said, “it’s your lucky day, lads. After that satisfying little episode with O’Stoat I’m feeling unusually generous. Let’s all get out of here now – and I haven’t visited The Crow for ages.”