The Barefooted Man looked at Joel. He didn’t seem in the least unfriendly.
‘Did you say you were lost?’ he asked. ‘Who are you looking for?’
‘David,’ said Joel.
‘David?’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘You certainly are lost. You’d better come with me. What do you want him for?’
What could Joel say to that?
Now he was in a right mess. The Barefooted Man was blocking the doorway. Joel would never be able to squeeze past him.
The Barefooted Man suddenly smiled broadly. Joel noticed that there were lots of gaps where teeth should have been.
‘Of course,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘You’re David’s kid brother.’
‘No I’m not,’ said Joel.
The Barefooted Man didn’t hear.
‘David’s kid brother,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
He took hold of Joel’s arm and led him away. His grip was not hard and unfriendly. Even so, Joel couldn’t wriggle free.
Joel was starting to feel frightened. The Caviar Man might not be at all pleased to find that somebody had turned up claiming to be his younger brother.
‘I think he’s in here,’ said the Barefooted Man.
They had descended into a dark basement room, and came to a halt in front of a steel door. Joel could hear a roaring sound behind the door.
The Barefooted Man turned what looked like a motor car’s steering wheel, and the door slid slowly open.
The roaring sound grew louder.
Joel was now beginning to feel scared stiff. Now was the time to run away. But he didn’t do so. It was as if he were stuck fast in his own fear.
The Barefooted Man opened the steel door even wider. The noise was overpowering now.
‘I think your brother’s in here,’ he yelled, trying to make himself heard above the roaring sound.
Joel suddenly felt very hot. The air flowing out through the steel door was as hot as a summer’s day.
‘Come on,’ said the Barefooted Man, propelling Joel in front of him.
Joel stopped dead on the threshold.
The room in front of him was on fire.
Enormous flames were roaring and thundering.
The Barefooted Man was pushing Joel in front of him, straight at the flames.
Joel suddenly remembered his dream.
The dream in which he’d burnt up.
The flames in front of him grew bigger and bigger.
Soon he would be swallowed up by the Underworld...
7
Afterwards, Joel felt a bit silly.
The Barefooted Man no doubt thought that Joel was a relative of Simon Windstorm. The Loonies.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the Barefooted Man had shouted. ‘You’re heading straight for the furnace.’
Then he’d grabbed Joel by the collar and lifted him to one side.
‘If you fall into the furnace, you’re a gonner,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘Couldn’t you see that the doors were open?’
Of course Joel had seen that the doors to the enormous furnace were open. Even so, it felt like standing in front of a hungry beast of prey that had opened its mouth wide and displayed thousands of burning tongues. And Joel had been lured towards them.
‘What’s the matter with you, lad?’ said the Barefooted Man, looking worried. ‘Has nobody told you that fire is dangerous?’
‘Why do you go around in your bare feet?’ asked Joel.
Sometimes it was best to answer a question by asking a new one.
‘It’s so hot here in the boiler room,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘My feet swell up inside my shoes. So I prefer to be barefoot. What’s your name by the way?’
‘Samuel,’ said Joel.
The Barefooted Man smiled.
‘David and Samuel,’ he said. ‘That really does sound like two brothers.’
Joel looked round in the Underworld. The big furnace was in the middle of a gigantic room. Smoke and steam were hissing out of pipes and ventilators.
The beast of the underworld, Joel thought.
He was being held prisoner here.
‘Where does all this heat go to?’ he asked. He was forced to shout, in order to be heard. The Barefooted Man was busy throwing big lumps of firewood into the beast’s mouth.
‘To the hospital and the vicarage and the old people’s home and the municipal offices, and lots of other buildings as well,’ he yelled.
‘What’s it called?’ Joel shouted.
The Barefooted Man straightened his back and wiped the sweat from his brow.
‘Called?’ he said. ‘I’m called Nilson.’
‘I meant the furnace,’ said Joel.
‘Furnaces don’t have names,’ said the Barefooted Man. Then he changed his mind.
‘Perhaps you have a suggestion for what we should call it?’
Joel thought for a moment.
The furnace was a sort of dragon. A beast of prey spitting fire.
‘Lord of the Fires,’ he said.
The Barefooted Man nodded.
‘A good name,’ he said. ‘Lord of the Fires.’
Then he threw in some more logs, and closed the big doors. He beckoned Joel to follow him. He led him along winding corridors that followed big pipes, and came to another steel door that he opened by rotating a thick iron handle. The door led into another long corridor, lit up by lamps hanging from the ceiling. It was raw and damp, and Joel wondered why the Barefooted Man’s feet didn’t seem to be cold.
He stopped.
‘Do you know where we are now?’ he asked.
Joel shook his head.
‘We’re underneath the church,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘Right in the middle of the church.’
Joel stared up at the ceiling of the stone corridor.
Could that really be possible?
Was the whole church really over his head?
What if the roof fell in?
That would mean he wasn’t buried in the churchyard, but in the church itself.
‘You don’t need to be afraid,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘This corridor isn’t going to cave in.’
They continued along the corridor, which seemed to be endless. It kept turning at right-angles, sometimes sloped downwards, sometimes upwards.
Where are we going? Joel thought.
The Barefooted Man eventually came to a stop at yet another steel door.
‘Sewer No. 1’, it said on a notice board.
The Barefooted Man opened the door. Joel stepped into a room full of tools and dismantled engines.
‘He’s not here,’ said the Barefooted Man.
‘That’s a pity,’ said Joel, but he thought it was just as well. It meant his pretending to be the younger brother wouldn’t be discovered,
‘I expect he’s out mending broken pipes,’ said the Barefooted Man. ‘But if you like, you can wait in my cabin.’
Cabin!
Were there cabins in the Underworld?
Joel had never heard of cabins being anywhere except on a boat.
He followed the Barefooted Man back to where they’d set out from.
‘Where are we now?’ asked Joel as they turned a corner in the long corridor.
The Barefooted Man smiled.
‘Halfway between the shoe shop and Leander’s Café,’ he said.
He pointed to an iron ladder fixed to the stone wall.
‘If you climb up there and open the hatch, you’ll find yourself outside the café,’ he said.
This is great, being in the Underworld, Joel thought. Having all those buildings and streets and cars and feet over your head.
David the Caviar Man, who worked down here, must be a good man for Gertrud. Not just for her, but for Joel as well. Joel didn’t know anybody else who’d been down here in the underground.
It struck him that he’d have to change the name of his Secret Society.
Now that he was no longer looking for the dog, he ought to give it a different name.
Lords of the Underworld, he thought.