He leaned over the edge, and the remembered smell like sourly fermented seaweed faintly stung his nostrils. He ran his hands around the curved inner surface and then he edged around the well until he felt the topmost iron rung. He sighed unhappily and swung one leg over the coping and carefully lowered his leg until his foot found the rung. There was a muffled clunk as the bottle in his pocket rapped the stone.
Only then did the lingering thought Latin name remind him that McKee had recited some kind of ritual phrase before entering the well.
He paused with both hands on the well rim and both boots on the rung, and across fourteen years he tried to remember what the phrase had been. There had been a mnemonic nursery rhyme to remind one of it, but he couldn’t remember the nursery rhyme either. Something about frogs and snails? Sugar and spice?
For a moment he thought of climbing out again and waiting in the total darkness by the well for McKee to make her way down here, but the whistling wail sounded again, perhaps not quite so far away now, and he just gritted his teeth and lowered one foot to feel for the next rung down.
He had descended down six of the rungs, about twelve feet, when something stung him painfully in the neck. It jolted him, but he clung to the rungs as his face suddenly chilled with sweat; and a moment later his left hand was stung twice. He let go of the rung to swat at the fluttering insects, and in that moment he remembered the nursery rhyme.
“Oranges and — damn it — lemons,” he gasped, turning his face away from another pair of invisible brushing wings. “Say the bells of St. Clement’s.”
And at that prompting the Latin came to him too. “Origo lemurum, you bastards!” he yelled.
He climbed down as rapidly as he dared, panting against the close brick wall, but perhaps the invocation had worked — he wasn’t stung again.
But though his hands and feet continued to grip and press against the iron bars, his eyes gradually registered a glow that was not vision, for it was in front of him no matter which way he turned his head. He kept palpably climbing down the iron brackets moored in the brick wall as the sour draft from below continued to whisper up around him, but what he was seeing became a wide landscape — he saw a pillared temple and stone buildings with towers, surrounded by straight streets and low white houses with plaster walls and arched gateways and red tile roofs; there was a broad river, with a lone long timber bridge spanning it, and ships with short masts and curved sternposts were moored along wooden wharves. Smaller rivers slanted through the city, and boats with sails moved slowly up and down them.
Into his head came the thought that this was London when it was called Londinium by these invaders from overseas, before the tributary rivers were roofed over to become sewers. Farms stretched in green squares outside the city wall.
And now the fields were overrun by men in furs whose faces and arms were dyed blue and who carried black iron swords; the Romans fought them with spears and shields and short steel swords, but the wild Celts vastly outnumbered them, and the Romans fled; but the Celts retreated too — and then the city began to ripple like lilies on a disrupted pond. The towers and houses fell, and the river rose and swept the bridge away, and clouds of tan dust shaken up from the low hills mingled with black smoke as the broken city burned.
The vision faded, but he was dimly able to see his hand on the rung in front of him; and it occurred to him that the vision had been in his mind alone, not in front of his eyes, or he wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all in this near-total blackness right afterward.
He held still, remembering having glimpsed fragments of this vision before. Clearly what he had just seen was the destruction of Roman London — by Boadicea in A.D. 60, according to Trelawny. And it had certainly involved an earthquake. She’d very much like to do it again, Trelawny had said this afternoon.
Crawford resumed climbing downward, and soon his reaching foot found no lower rung, so he lowered himself joltingly by his hands alone to the bottom-most rung, swung for a moment, and then dropped.
He fell about ten feet into damp sand and managed not to fall over or bang his chin on his knee, and he patted his pocket and was reassured to feel that the bottle was still there. When he straightened up, he could see the faint round-topped vertical glows of at least four arched doorways around him — he had forgotten that there were more than one, and he didn’t have an ave to guide him.
He paced from one arch to another in the near-total gloom, listening carefully for the chirping of birds. At one arch he heard a distant susurrus like rushing water, and at another the remote windy groaning, and so he brushed his hair back from his face with both hands, took a deep breath, and ducked into one of the silent tunnels.
It curved to the left, which was familiar, but soon, instead of the broad glow of Chichuwee’s chamber, he saw a dot of yellow light ahead. It seemed some yards away at first, but quickly dropped in apparent height as he approached it, and when it disappeared in the moment before his groping hands brushed a wall of upright planks — and then his fingers felt down the length of it to a pitted doorknob — he realized that the tiny glow was a keyhole.
He crouched to peer through it and saw, perhaps twenty feet beyond the door, a lamplit row of high desks at which visored young clerks wrote with pens in big ledger books.
Crawford sat back on his heels, frowning. Could this be the deepest sub-basement of some enormous bank? He straightened up and tried to twist the doorknob, but it didn’t move at all.
Crouching again, he put his mouth to the keyhole and called, “Hello! I wonder if any of you could direct me?”
Quickly he put his eye to the keyhole again, and he had to blink — this time the lamplight was much dimmer, and the clerks were bent with age, their beards long and white.
“Still here?” called one of them wearily. “On your way and face your sins, phantom, we can erase no names.”
Crawford recoiled and sat down on the sandy tunnel floor, nearly losing the bottle, then got to his feet and hurried away, back to the central chamber below the well, and he made his way down another of the tunnels.
This one did not bend, but he didn’t remember whether Chichuwee’s did right away or not, so he followed it for a few yards before concluding that it wasn’t the right one either; but ahead of him now he could see a faint vertical streak of emerald light that widened and narrowed, as if it were a gap between a curtain and a wall, and he stole forward to peek at what might lie beyond.
But as he hesitantly touched the curtain, a woman’s voice said, faintly, “Oh, help me, please, brother!”
He froze, and a moment later shook his head and started to turn around, and then was appalled to realize that he could not in good conscience walk away from it; and so he braced himself and pushed the curtain aside.
The room beyond was wide and lit from some undetectable source in flickering green, as if it were under sunlit water. The floor was polished stone. Immediately in front of Crawford stood a glass table with a handful of black gravel and sand on it, and against the far wall was a long couch flanked by two chairs, with shelves above it.
At first he couldn’t see the woman who had spoken. He took two steps forward. “Er … hello?” he said.
Then she spoke, and he saw that she was reclining on the couch amid a tumble of cushions. Her face, turned toward him, was narrow and youthful.
“Save me,” she said, “please.”