Felix Underground

By Patrick Patourel

In a dark old factory in a sinister old town, a young boy is working to feed his family.  Felix is training as a printer - until: disaster!  He drops a letter down the drain, and before he knows what is happening he is dragged underground also, down to a world of boiling mud and beetles where child prisoners mine for gold, guarded by talking green gas and menaced by white alligators which are after the gold.

But Felix is not a boy to be a prisoner for long...

A masterly and creepy story for readers who can cope with tunnels and alligators...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stupor Mundi Books
• Release date: Mar 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9798215181683

Book preview

Stupor Mundi

Fife

2018

First published by Stupor Mundi

in e-book format 2017

Stupor Mundi – Wonder of the World

Cupar, KY14 6JF, UK

www.stupormundibooks.wordpress.com

[e-mail]

© Patrick Patourel 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the prior permission of the publisher.

FELIX DRAGGED UNDERGROUND...

Felix wriggled the end of the screwdriver under the drain cover to lever it up. Excited, he put all his weight on the handle. The drain cover shifted a little.

Then something peculiar happened. The iron cover lifted easily, smoothly, quickly – as though it was being pushed from underneath.

Things became more peculiar still. As the heavy lid flipped over and clanged loudly to the floor, Felix tried to catch it. As he bent, tiny hands – yes, hands! – reached up and seized him by his thick curly hair. He felt himself pulled forward, toppling, tumbling head first into the black drain, which gaped open to swallow him...

Chapter One

Steam Printing

IN A GLOOMY, DIRTY, cobwebby room, all hung about with spiders’ webs and peeling wallpaper, and with a slippery floor and crumbling plaster walls, a boy was sitting on a high stool hard at work, with his wooden clogs on the floor below.

His name was Felix Flowerdew and he looked pretty odd, very skinny but with a thick tangle of black hair on his head, such that other children called him ‛Bottlebrush’. You might think that he should be at school, but in this town, few children went to school at all. You might think that was a wonderful thing: no school. You wouldn’t have liked it. These children had to work.

The factories in town all employed children. There was Grand Imperial Iron & Steel, where children were sent inside the furnaces to clean them out. There was the Royal Cotton Mill, where children crawled about under the dangerous clanking looms rescuing dropped shuttles. There was National Fish Canning where fish were gutted by women with sharp knives, and then packed into tins by the little hands of children. There was The People’s Shining Light, where children’s agile fingers made the fiddly bits of electric torches. And there was the First Universal Steam Printing Company, where we find Felix.

None of this was any fun.

From time to time some children just disappeared. When this first started happening, the parents of the missing children always made a terrible fuss and begged their neighbours to help them. A search party would gather, and Felix and Mr Flowerdew his father helped; after all, the missing children were often their friends.

The searchers would go into the darkest corners of old warehouses and ruined mills, would search the riverbeds and the caves and rubbish dumps, but they would never find the children. Messages would be sent to other towns nearby, but there was never any news. The police made a show of investigating, but got nowhere.

These disappearances happened again and again, and after a while it was difficult to get anyone to help search, because nobody was ever found. So parents began to keep their children close by them, not letting them play in the street, or making sure they went safely to work – like young Felix Flowerdew, sitting at the bench in the cobwebby room at First Universal Steam Printing.

What was he doing? Felix was cleaning type – the little metal letters used for printing back then. Each letter was a little stick of metal you put in place with your fingers. And when you’d finished printing, they all had to be cleaned. He had a heap of metal type, and a bowl of cleaning fluid with a strong, oily smell, and he was scrubbing the type with a toothbrush. The smell gave Felix a headache, and he had no one to talk to, but Felix didn’t talk much anyway. Besides, he was hungry. He wasn’t thinking about his work; he was thinking about food.

His mother would be bringing lunch soon. She baked bread at home, and Felix imagined he could smell the hot baking scent. Mrs Flora Flowerdew did the baking for half the houses in Sleet Street. Her bread was crisp and fragrant, and tasted of hazelnuts which she gathered in the woods. Just thinking about it made his mouth water.

He glanced at the big clock at the end of the passage: nearly midday. Mother would be here at any moment. He thought of her leaving Sleet Street, marching up Shiver Alley and along the print works lane, carrying a blue cloth bundle with new bread and marmalade, and a bottle of tea for Felix and his father. He thought of her round, jolly face, her red cheeks and her sparkling blue eyes. He imagined neighbours calling, ‘My goodness, Flora Flowerdew, the scent of that bread will drive us all wild!’

He grinned to think of Mother laughing and waving to friends, swinging cheerily along the lane towards the print works. She’d be here any moment.

Except that she wasn’t.

Felix sneaked another look at the clock: ten past noon. Mother was late. At twenty past, Felix’s father came to the door and called:

‘Felix, son? Has your mother not come?’

Felix shook his head.

At half past, all the men and boys in the works took their short lunch break outside – but Felix and his father had no lunch. They stood in the doorway overlooking the crowded yard.

‘Where’s she got to?’ murmured Father. Felix said nothing.

They stood waiting, until the other men began to return to work.

‘I’ll ask the porter,’ said Father, and he went towards the gate.

Then Felix saw his father and the porter speaking urgently with Mr Forsum Sternly, the print works manager. Father looked puzzled and concerned. All three men turned and glanced across the yard to where Felix stood, easy to spot because of his thick mop of curly black hair.

‘Young Flowerdew!’ called Forsum Sternly, ‘come here, if you please.’

Felix saw that he was frowning.

‘Have you seen your mother, young man?’ said Forsum Sternly.

‘No, sir,’ replied Felix.

‘We can’t have this,’ said the manager. ‘The porter saw her come in. She must be here.’

They searched the print works. Others had seen Mrs Flowerdew come in. She was a popular, smiling figure (and you couldn’t ignore the scent of that bread). She had been noticed as she passed along the dreary passages that always seemed to be awash with oil and rainwater, even when the sun was shining...  But then she had just vanished.

‘There’s some mistake,’ said Father.

‘No mistake, Flowerdew,’ said the porter. ‘She came in all right.’

‘Then she must have gone home again!’ Felix could hear the fear in Father’s voice.

‘I tell you, no!’ snapped the porter crossly. ‘She came in, she did not go out.’

‘We have to tell Mr Hardy-Grimbleton,’ said Forsum Sternly. So they told K.D. Hardy-Grimbleton, the owner of the works, and he ordered the whole place searched again, thinking that Mrs Flowerdew had perhaps dropped dead. He didn’t want people dying in his works: it didn’t look good in the newspapers.

Felix ran here and there like a mad thing, and people looked up from their work amazed to see Bottlebrush hurtling past on his skinny legs calling, ‘Mum? Mum!’

He searched the machine hall where the printing presses rolled and rumbled; he searched the engine room where steam turbines drove belts that turned shafts and more belts to power all those printing presses. His father searched the coal bunkers, the bookbindery and the paper store. But they never found her.

At the end of the day, Felix and Mr Flowerdew looked at each other in dismay – and had to go home without her. As they walked back down Shiver Alley, Felix asked over and over:

‘What’s happened, Dad? What’s happened to Mum?’

Which was as many words as Felix usually spoke in a day.

But his father only answered, ‘Come on!’ and strode along even faster, so they got home almost at a run, praying that she would be there, that perhaps one of the twins was sick and she’d been detained, or something...

But when they reached home, Mother was not there either. The twins – little Martha and Maria – said together, ‘Where Mummy?’ just as Felix said, ‘Where’s Mum?’ and his father said to Granny Nora, ‘Where’s our Flora got to?’ and Granny Nora asked Father, ‘Do you know what’s happened to Flora?’

They had all asked at once – but no one had an answer.

That evening, Felix helped Granny Nora put the twins to bed while Father went to the police and the church and the marketplace and everywhere he could think of. But there was no news. Felix sat on the bed that he shared with the twins and sang them small songs to keep them from thinking too much about what might be wrong. So at last, everyone fell asleep without a word – because what was there to say?

That month, two more children disappeared, one of them a friend of Felix from Sleet Street. But Mrs Flowerdew was the first grown-up to vanish.

Chapter Two

Felix in the Mirror

BEFORE MOTHER DISAPPEARED, there had been laughter and smiles in the Flowerdew house, though they were poor as mice.

The town was built in a deep valley behind a mountain – an ancient volcano, in fact. The sun seldom penetrated the town below. Even when it did, it was very feeble and warmed nothing. The streets were steep and the cobbles became dangerously icy in cold weather. But up on the hills – where Caleb Beggarstaff, the Hardy-Grimbletons and other rich people lived in marble mansions – the sun almost shone everyday.

Mr and Mrs Flowerdew took the family up there each Sunday, with their friends. There were high flowery pastures where flocks of goats moved with a steady clonkle clunkle from the bells about their necks. The poor families could have picnics, and Felix could play with the younger children, who liked him because he didn’t use big words. The children would play quoits – throwing an iron ring over a distant peg in the ground. Felix could throw very accurately, and his quoit would twizzle round the iron peg with a satisfactory clang.

‘Brilliant, Bottlebrush!’ the others yelled, and Felix was proud. He was shy of talking, because the words often came out wrong. But throwing quoits accurately was like a sort of talking he was good at.

Father would point out the mansion where Caleb Beggarstaff, the first owner of First Universal Steam Printing, lived by himself, and Felix would could see Mr Beggarstaff standing all alone at the big windows of his luxurious but silent house, watching the happy families in the sunshine. Sometimes they would see other rich people come out of their mansions, pace once or twice around their gardens, then disappear back indoors. They didn’t seem to enjoy the sun very much.

One day, a gawky young man appeared on the steps of the Hardy-Grimbleton mansion. He saw