Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire

Author:Oliver Darkshire [Darkshire, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529192995
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2022-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

26

Waterworks

IF YOU ARE one of the five or six people who walk down Sackville Street each day, and if you manage to avoid being hit by a confused taxi heading in the wrong direction, or being clotheslined by the Sotheran’s awning, you might notice that towards the end of the street the pavement becomes rather strange underfoot. In what could be mistaken for an honest blunder, the flagstones in front of Sotheran’s have been replaced with a combination of concrete and thick glass squares. From above, these squares seem grey, thanks to the accumulated grime of many decades, and a passer-by might not give them more than a confused second glance. Some people even take the time to stomp on them.

Deep below the surface of the earth, daylight filters through some of the panels to a hallway which runs under the shop. This unusual and impractical architectural feature is anecdotally attributed to a Mr Knott, an erstwhile employee and cellar worker of Sotheran’s who (if legends are true) had his own somewhat lecherous reasons for wanting glass panels overhead. Whether this is true or not, whoever installed the glass was a poor architect, as the course of years caused the glass to quickly acquire a layer of filth that reduced the light to a dim kind of twilight. No ladder is tall enough to reach the panels from below and clean them, which perhaps thankfully means they’ve been dirty for all of living memory. Looking up at the panels from below gives one the sense of being trapped in an oubliette.

In time, Mr Knott shuffled off the mortal coil, and the original intent of the glass flooring was forgotten. What could not be changed, however, was the fact that glass makes for an exceedingly inadequate construction material for a London thoroughfare, even one as starved of foot traffic as Sackville Street. The steady tramping of feet overhead, coupled with the steady rumble of the underground, began to slowly crack the glass.

In consequence, whenever it rains, water leaks through the cracks and wends downwards into the shop basement. In normal London conditions, when the rain trickles down in intermittent fits and bursts, this manifests as a slight dampness, but in the winter months the various tributaries trickle all the way down to the floor. In the process they almost always manage to find the light switches (placed there by electrical engineers who clearly carried out the job on a bright summer’s day) and so the cellars are particularly gloomy even for Sotheran’s. When the water reaches the floor, the tributaries join together into a single flow which heads downhill and pools near the staff kitchen.

Two, and only two, prospective ‘solutions’ to this problem have ever been enacted.

First, a complaint is made to the landlord, which grumbles up through the staff until it reaches some faceless creature in a faraway office block. A complaint made in this manner functions as a sort of invocation, which (after a waiting period somewhere between three

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