Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in The Aldgate Cistern ·
The Song in the Aldgate Cistern
A water-board inspector climbs down into the old Aldgate cistern to close a valve and meets the whale that lives in the reservoir, and the song it sings in the pipes is the same one his mother hummed.
The Aldgate cistern was built under the city in the reign of the first queen, a vault of brick arches large enough to hold three cathedrals, and for most of the last century it has been drained, cleaned and filled again on a schedule that nobody in the water board can quite reconstruct. Hector Lowry is the inspector who has the cistern this winter, and the job is simple on paper: descend the shaft, close the outflow valve that has been leaking into the storm drains, and come back up before the pressure in the feeder main rises.
He goes down at six in the morning, with a lamp and a rope and a radio that crackles under the ground. The shaft is cold and smells of iron. At the bottom the air opens out into a dark so large that his lamp finds only the first few columns, black and wet with a fine green slime, and beyond them the faint silver shimmer of standing water stretching away into nothing.
The valve is on the far side, nearly two hundred yards along a walkway that someone has built out over the water on iron brackets. Hector walks it slowly. The brackets creak. Halfway across, the lamp catches a ripple on the surface, and he stops.
The water is moving in a long slow curve, not with the current, which he knows runs the other way, but around something. He sees the edge of a grey back break the surface and sink again. The shape is enormous, far larger than a cistern ought to hold, and when it sounds, the whole vault fills with a note so low that Hector feels it in his teeth before he hears it.
The radio speaks in his ear: "Lowry, report." He does not answer. He cannot.
The song rises through the water and the pipes at once. It is wordless and sweet, a rising and falling phrase like something sung to a child in the dark, and Hector knows it, though he has not heard it since he was seven years old and his mother was humming it over the washing-up in a small terraced kitchen two streets away. She used to sing it when the pipes knocked. She said it was the water thinking. He had forgotten that for thirty years, and now he remembers it all at once, the warm steam, the sound of her voice, the taste of the tea in the blue cup.
He walks on. He does not decide to. His feet take him the rest of the way to the valve, and his hands find the wheel, and the wheel is cold and slick and will not move. He braces his shoulder against it. Behind him, the water rises in a slow swell, and the whale comes up out of it, a long dark body lit by the lamp like a wet black slope, and its eye, very large and very patient, turns toward him.
It does not attack. It sings again, and in the song there is a question he cannot quite hear. The pipes take up the phrase, and somewhere far above in the city a tap is opened, and water hums through the iron.
Hector understands, with a clarity that frightens him, that the whale is not defending the valve. It is asking him to leave it open. The leak into the storm drains is the water's way of singing down to the streets, and the streets have been singing back for a hundred years in the form of rain and taps and the small sounds of houses settling. It is not a fault. It is a conversation.
He turns the wheel the other way. It gives at once, as if it had been waiting. The valve stays open. The whale sinks slowly, and the song goes down with it, and the walkway is quiet.
When he reaches the surface an hour later, the feeder main is at full pressure and the storm drains are running clear. His report says the valve was seized and that he was unable to close it. The board sends another man. The other man does not go down. He stands at the top of the shaft with a flask of tea and listens, and says, after a while, that he can hear someone humming, very faint, from a long way under the city.