Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean Read Free

beefy hands down his stained apron, slipping his substantial girth behind the bar like an eel fitting into a hole too small for it.
    “Come on then, Skupper! I’ve got a right to know! I’m on the committee to save this here pub—”
    “Don’t want to save it,” Skupper growled, pulling a lever to gush draft into a glass. “Want to sell the buggerin’ bog-hole.”
    “—and if he’s buying up property round here from Lord Smithson, why, we have a right to see to preservation—there’s preservation laws! It’s hard enough keeping some semblance of tradition, with the foot-and-mouth driving the piggeries and sheepmen out of business. How many farms selling off to developers, and the like! The only other pub already turned into flats! And fox hunting banned, so Lord Smithson can’t go out anymore with his hounds!”
    “Here, you’re one to talk of tradition, Butterworth,” said Harry Garth, a cadaverous man with white hair and a deeply lined face, and a cap he’d had so long it was scarcely more than a rag, though he had money enough from selling his dairy to buy any number of new caps. “Wasn’t so long ago you were trying to get us to host a bloody rock festival!”
    “Wasn’t long ago, he says!” Butterworth retorted, chalking his cue furiously. “Why, that was twenty-five bloody years ago! I was scarcely more than a boy!”
    “Was I you, Butterworth,” said Skupper, scowlingly wiping out a glass with a rag that might be making it dirtier than it had been before, “I would not ask overmuch about MacCrawley and Lord Smithson. If they is doing deals, Smithson won’t take to anyone poking their great beezers into ’is business. They’re in some kind of lodge together too, like the Masons or the Oddfellers, for they both got the ring—and them as in lodges is tight.”
    “He’s right,” said Garth. “You run your tourist shop at the sufferance of ’is Lordship. Turn you out whenever he pleases!”
    Butterworth scoffed—then pointed his cue at the back door, where Garth’s teenage grandson, Bosky, was furtively reaching through to a forgotten glass of whiskey on a table, trying to snake it out without being seen. “Here, Garth, your grandson’s at the whiskey again!”
    “Bosky!” Garth roared, coming out of his booth, waving his cane. “Cease and desist, boy, or I’ll tell your mother, you—”
    Bosky snagged the whiskey glass and ducked out with it, tittering, followed by an ashtray thrown by Skupper. “Garth, you’d better keep your grandson out of here or I’ll have the rozzers on him!”
    ~
    Outside, Bosky knocked back the whiskey, shuddered, tossed the shot glass into a pile of crates and led the way out of the alley as Finn and Geoff came complaining after him, asking why he hadn’t shared the drink. “Because it wasn’t enough to share, you pillocks! Come on, let’s go to the wood and smoke up what I got in my pocket!”
    “You what?” Geoff chided him. “You said you had nothing!”
    “Almost nothing. It’s not much more than a crumble . . . Let’s cut through Mrs. Bushel’s yard . . .”
    They were running much of the time, vaulting fences, dodging bulldogs—two bulldogs, one old and fat and one young and sleek, in two yards—and pounding up the lane, skylarking, trying to trip one another up. Then they veered off the road onto the familiar path into the Smithson Wood, his Lordship’s land, as so much was hereabouts, Geoff tapping at his iPod to try to get it going, stumbling over the mossy stones as he frowned down at the device. “Forgot to charge the bloody thing . . .”
    Bosky led them through the intermittent shafts of sunlight slanting through the branches of the alders, the ash trees, the English oaks. The thin cloud cover, sometimes drooling rain, only reluctantly let the sun through . . .
    Not a quarter mile more and they’d reached the place some called “the barrow,” an old pile of stony hummocks taking up most of a clearing. They liked to