Read Online Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson - Free Book Online Page A

were floating about in the water; old crisp packets and burger boxes, and she was glad when they began to move slightly uphill, and the water shallowed out to indented puddles in the clay floor.
    Gabriel didn’t speak to Silver until they were able to walk side by side.
    ‘This be the way to the Chamber, but we must go by the Devils.’
    ‘Who are the Devils?’
    ‘You shall see them.’
    The roof of the passage was getting higher, when suddenly Gabriel doused his torch in a puddle and pulled Silver into an opening in the wall. As they stood still and silent as statues, she could hear voices approaching, and then she saw four men wearing red waterproof suits and full-face helmets with somekind of air filter on the front. They carried high-pressure water guns. She guessed they were for the maintenance of the drains or something like that. Whatever they were, they weren’t devils, but Gabriel was trembling.
    As soon as the men had gone by, towards the culvert where the Mammoth had come in, Gabriel took Silver’s hand and they started on their journey again. He was fearful, and kept looking round.
    ‘It’s all right, Gabriel,’ said Silver. ‘They are human beings like us. Um, well, like me, but men, and grown up. They aren’t devils.’
    ‘Did you not see their red bodies and their heads of monsters and their weapons?’
    ‘Those were just waterproof clothes and water guns and some sort of safety helmet, that’s all. When they take it off they look like humans, like Updwellers.’
    ‘They cannot take off their heads and bodies,’ said Gabriel, ‘and I have seen them use their water-weapons. Water is soft but the Devils magic it hard as iron.’
    ‘It’s pressurised,’ said Silver.
    ‘You do not know them,’ said Gabriel. ‘It is Goliath they seek.’
    ‘The Mammoth.’
    ‘Yea. The Devils will kill him with their weapons.’
    ‘Gabriel,’ said Silver, ‘do you ever go above ground?’
    ‘We cannot live Upground. We can go there but we cannot live there. We would be killed.’
    ‘Who would kill you?’
    ‘Devils or Wardens or the soldiers, or the White Lead Man.’
    Silver couldn’t understand this at all, so she fell silent and looked around her to see what these tunnels and passages were.
    They were built of brick, and here and there steel ladders were anchored to the walls, leading upwards, she supposed, to the pavement and all those metal plates and grilles that you can see when you walk around the city. She had never thought about what was underneath all those plates and grilles. She had never guessed that there might be a whole world.
    A rumbling through the wall made her think that they must be near a Tube train station. She glanced at Gabriel; he didn’t seem bothered by the noise.
    ‘What’s that?’ she said, to see if he knew what it was.
    ‘That be the Long Wagon,’ said Gabriel. ‘Updwellers use him when they come down here. They fear to walk here by themselves. They come all together in the Long Wagon.’
    ‘Why do they come down here – the Updwellers?’
    Silver knew that everybody used the Tube to travel round the city, but she wanted to know what Gabriel thought about it.
    ‘It be their loneliness,’ he said. ‘Updwellers be lonely for the ground they come from. They come here to remember.’
    Silver was beginning to realise that Gabriel’s world was not like her own world one bit. But then her world had a lotwrong with it, so she wasn’t going to say anything rude about his.
    ‘Updwellers lived here once. Look and see.’
    Gabriel opened a little door in the wall and led her on to a deserted platform.
    At first it looked like any other Tube station platform, but then Silver realised that the posters on the walls were from the Second World War, because all the people in them were wearing gas masks.
    ‘Updwellers,’ repeated Gabriel, and sure enough, they came to a row of rotting stripy mattresses, with blankets still thrown on them, and here and there old newspapers