Another book has a voice...
The Beast Beneath the Bells is in audio — and the river is older than I told you.
Darklings, the audiobook for The Beast Beneath the Bells is live, and I have not stopped listening to it since the files came in.
Hearing a book you wrote out loud is a special gift. Sunder, on the page, was always meant to sound broken — his words come up through forty years of dark. On the page I could only describe that. In the audio, you hear it. Tirzah M.M. Hawkins narrates again — she has now given a voice to lava entities, ancient evils, medieval healers, and had to learn pronunciations in Latin, Hawaiian, and probably a few other languages for me — and what she does with him here is nothing short of brilliant.
She also gives Cordelia the quiet I felt inside when I wrote her. Cordelia is a conservator, and Tirzah’s voice for her is steady like Cordelia’s hands are steady, even when the rest of her is shaking.
Listen, if you can.
BONUS CONTENT · A CODEX
What the River Remembers
The real Thames folklore that lives underneath the book. Pin this in your reading bible.
People kept asking me, while I was writing The Beast Beneath the Bells, where the Troth came from. Whether I had made it up. I did and I didn’t. The Troth is mine. The river it grew out of is older than any of us, and the folklore around it is real, and most of it is still there if you know where to look.
Here is the layer underneath the book.
The Thames has a name older than England. The Romans called it Tamesis. The name probably comes from a Celtic root — tamēssa, tame — related to words for dark or the dark one. Old Father Thames is the personification most people picture: a white-bearded statue at St. John’s Lock in Lechlade. The bearded man is Victorian. The dark one is older. The Thames was a god before it was a road.
A river that was worshipped, then forgotten. The British Museum holds objects pulled from the Thames mud that should not, by ordinary loss, be where they were found. The Battersea Shield. The Waterloo Helmet. Bronze Age swords. Iron Age daggers. Saxon spearheads. These were not lost. They were given. For centuries, the people who lived along the river dropped weapons and ornaments into the water as offerings. The mudlarks of the modern Thames are still pulling these objects out of the tidal silt. The river received them. The river received the named and the un-named, the rich and the poor, the marriages and the deaths. The acknowledgment was the worship.
This is what the Troth is built on. They left things at the water’s edge — food, flowers, small carved figures pressed into the mud at low tide. They did not worship him. They acknowledged him. That is not invention. That is what people did.
London’s lost rivers are buried spirits. This is the part that haunted me while I was writing. London is built on rivers. Not just the Thames. The Fleet. The Walbrook. The Tyburn. The Effra. The Westbourne. The Falcon. The Neckinger. Tributaries of the Thames, every one of them — and every one of them was once open water. Every one of them ran beside roads, ran past churches, was fished in and prayed at and given to.
They are not open anymore. They were culverted — buried in brick — over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Fleet is a sewer now. The Walbrook runs under the Bank of England. The Tyburn passes beneath Buckingham Palace. The Effra surfaces, briefly, in the Brixton roads when it rains hard enough to push it back up through the drains.
These rivers had names once. The names had power. The names had spirits.
When Sunder says you cannot exist at a threshold if the threshold is paved over, I am thinking about the lost rivers of London. Every one of them was a spirit before it was a sewer.
Jenny Greenteeth and the river hags. English river folklore is full of women in the water who pull children under. Jenny Greenteeth, in the Lancashire and Cheshire mosses, is the most famous — green-skinned, long-fingered, lurking under the duckweed. Peg Powler haunts the Tees the same way. Nelly Long-Arms is everywhere and nowhere. Folklorists call these figures drowning bogies: warning stories, invented to keep children away from open water. But they are also the inverse shape of something more interesting.
The river is not a malevolent woman waiting in the duckweed. The river is a place where things happen that human beings cannot prevent. The hag is what grief makes when it has nowhere else to go.
When Wren loses Elise in The Beast Beneath the Bells, his grief makes a chain. Two centuries earlier, the same grief would have made a hag. Both are explanations. Both are wrong. Both are necessary.
The bells are real. I did not make St. Dunstan-in-the-East up. It is a real twelfth-century parish church in the City of London, gutted in the Blitz, now a public garden you can sit in at lunch with a sandwich. Fig trees grow where the altar was. The bell tower still stands. The tenor bell — the oldest in the tower in my version of the church — really did once toll the hours over the bend of the river where Sunder stands. The current ruin is bell-less. The arches are empty.
If you visit, sit on the bench by the south wall and look up at the belfry. The bells have been gone almost a century. The arches still remember them.
That is the kind of memory the book is about.
The bone-deep truth. Folklore is not a costume. It is what people did when they had no other tools to make sense of the unmakable. They left offerings because the alternative — to acknowledge that the river took without reason and would keep taking — was worse than the offering. They named the hag because the alternative — that drowning was nothing but cold water and bad luck — was worse than the name.
The Troth is fictional. The impulse behind it is not.
The Beast Beneath the Bells sits on top of all of this. I wanted the book to feel like it was telling you something you already half-knew — like the folklore was still in the water, waiting for someone to listen for it.
The audiobook listens for it.
That is the gift of an audio reading: it puts the listening back into the story. The river speaks. The bells speak. Sunder’s broken voice — and he is broken — sounds, at last, the way it sounded in my head when I was writing.
There is a companion piece to this one. Sunder had a name before he was Sunder — the river gave it to him in a language older than English, a word that sounded like water over stone. The vignette of that morning, when the four guardians of London were still whole, lives on the site. You have to go to both to see it all. That seems right, somehow. The book was always about pieces that only become whole when they are put back together.
Listen on Audible: The Beast Beneath the Bells, narrated by Tirzah Hawkins
The Sunder vignette on the Darkling Collective Site
Thank you, as always, for being here.
— Kate
Need more read while you wait for the release of Bone Sacrament next week?
