Free Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones by Mark Speed Page B

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