Dark Cities Underground by Lisa Goldstein

Author:Lisa Goldstein [GOLDSTEIN, LISA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780312868284
Publisher: Tor; Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 1999-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

I AM APPRECIATIVE of the honour the Metropolitan Railway wishes to do my father, Richard F. King, on this, their fiftieth anniversary [Septimus King had written]. My father was quite a complex man, however, and I will not do justice to his memory by ignoring those aspects of his personality which may be considered unsavory.

My father had traveled widely in his youth, taking not only the usual Continental Tour but journeying as well to Mexico, India, Russia, and the Near East. It was this last that captured his imagination more than any other place in the world, and he re­ turned there many times, particularly to Egypt. He was fasci­nated by Egyptian antiquities, and he brought back to England a great many strange objects: figurines, statuary, jewellery, papyri, stelae, mummies and sarcophagi.

Where are these fabulous relics now? Where is what might have been the great Richard F. King bequest to the British Museum? Where the discoveries that scholars might have made by studying these things? These are questions I have often asked myself.

I can offer only a piece of the answer. I knew—and know—very little about my father; this article I have been asked to write by the Metropolitan Railway is in part an attempt to piece to­gether the various clues I do have. I am not even certain that he is dead, though he would be extremely old. I will have to beg the reader’s indulgence and stray from the topic of my father in order to talk a little about myself and how I came to learn what I know.

My father named me Septimus—an odd choice, because Sep­timus of course means “seven” and I was the oldest of five chil­dren. He had superstitious ideas about the number seven and all of its multiples; in one of our rare conversations he told me that he would have named me Twenty-eight if my mother had allowed it, and I do not believe he was joking.

I’m afraid I proved rather a disappointment to him. He wanted a son who would take over the day to day affairs of his transportation empire, and I showed no talent or interest in that direction. I was a dreamy child, interested only in musty books of old romances. My brother George—my mother’s common sense had prevailed in the naming of this one—was eventually chosen as Father’s successor.

All of us children spent the mornings with our governess, but we were free to do as we liked in the afternoons. My brothers and sisters tended to play together, but I enjoyed wandering by myself through our huge old house, mooning and dreaming and telling stories to myself. It was on one of these journeys that I discovered the doorway, and Father’s secret.

It was in the basement, in a storeroom filled with old furni­ture and clothes and toys that we had outgrown and forgotten. For reasons that no one remembered there was a mural of a Roman villa with a stately grove of trees painted on one of the walls.

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