Underground

by Tobias Hill

  Her laughter comes from deep in her throat and he is glad of it. ‘You fucking liar. I bet you never even had a dog. Did you?’

  ‘No.’ He is close enough to touch her now. Her hair is pulled over one shoulder and he can see her bare neck under the grimy collar of her jacket. The skin and cloth are sheened with sweat. She doesn’t look round.

  ‘I didn’t have a dog either. I always wanted one. Something big with real teeth. My carer said I wouldn’t look after it but I would have. Then it would have looked after me –’

  Alice stops talking. Casimir walks into her as her pace slows, his hands going out against her warm back. ‘He’s getting closer.’

  ‘No, not him. Don’t you hear it?’

  He feels it first. Through his feet, a vibration in the tunnel floor. There is a noise behind them, still distant. Pressure building underground.

  ‘It’s a train. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ He counts the line-lights. Thirty-nine, forty. ‘There is a junction ahead of us. Go as fast as you can.’

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘A hundred feet. Go faster.’

  ‘Is there room for us? If the train comes first.’

  ‘No.’ The train is louder now. It sounds as if earth is moving southwards. Piling towards them through the half-dark.

  There is another clatter of stones behind them and a noise that might be human, an echoed hah of effort. Alice starts to run. Almost immediately her feet slip on the ballast stones and she stumbles between the nearest two tracks, finds her balance and keeps going.

  Casimir picks up speed. The sound of the train is intimately familiar to him, air avalanching before its flat head. Part of him knows how close it is and his mind blanks out, not allowing him to estimate the distance behind them, the distance ahead. The tunnel dream comes to him, very clear. The alcove always beside him. At the last window of the train, Alice’s face.

  ‘Where is it?’ She is screaming now and as she does so another noise starts up behind them, a braying roar. It is hard to make out as a human sound. Alice cries out again. There is a rhythm to the other voice, violent and reflexive, like sobbing or hysterical laughter. The force of it and the force of the train come barrelling towards them along the metal tunnel walls.

  Shadows flicker around Casimir, thrown ahead by the last line-light. Then the junction alcove is beside him. He almost runs past it, so that he has to reach out for Alice, hauling her back under the tangle of cables, holding her into the dark space. Pressing his face into her hair.

  The noise reaches them, a deafening rumble. It sounds volcanic, a great force trapped underground. It sweeps on and under them, the ground shuddering like a motorway. A light rain of dust falls on their bent forms from the mare’s nest of cables. The roar of air begins to fade southwards, towards Camden Town.

  Casimir puts his head back against the alcove wall. Sweat stings his eyes and he blinks it away, breathing hard. After a moment Alice begins to move. Pulling away. Her laughter is high and keen, on the edge of hysteria.

  ‘What was that, what was it, was it a ghost train? There was nothing there, was there? I didn’t see it.’

  ‘No. I think it was a postal train.’

  She closes her eyes, shivering. ‘What’s a postal train?’

  ‘There are mail Tubes. Unmanned trains. In some places the tunnels go near ours. I’ve never been so close to one before.’ His hands are shaking and he closes them around her biceps.

  Alice opens her eyes. The control is back in them, the pupils dilating, adjusting to the dark space. ‘It went underneath us, didn’t it?’

  He nods. She leans her face against his, forehead to forehead. Whispers to him. ‘He would be dead, if it’d been a real train. My carer. And now he’s not.’ He can feel her breath and the lashes of her eyes as she blinks, almost smiling. Her breath and his steadying together. ‘What a shame.’

  She kisses him gently. Pulls away, pressing her hand against his lips as she leans out of the alcove, rises to her feet, already starting to run.

  Casimir hauls himself up and out. He can see the paleness of Alice’s hair, flickering south between line-lights. He opens his mouth to call after her and as he does so, the roaring begins behind him. Gut-deep and angry, rising into a ragged wail. Casimir feels a switch kicked over in his head. The darkness around him, the desperate sound of fear behind him.

  He starts to run. On the tenth step his ankle twists, the calf dragging against the signal rail’s cold metal. He hears and feels the electricity snapping his leg rigid. Alice is calling from up ahead and he stumbles against the wall and on.

  ‘I can see the end! I see it! Don’t look back. Casimir! I can see –’

  Still running, he looks back. The carer is less than a hundred yards away. In themselves his movements are not frightening but almost comical, like something in an old film. Sped-up. His T-shirt flaps loose from his jeans. Casimir can see the fish-white flesh of his belly, big but muscular, fat only in the way wrestlers are fat. But so white, like something not used to the light.

  And now there is less than fifty yards between them. He moves like Alice, thinks Casimir; the quickness and silence are deceptive. He is surprised at the human face, as if part of him expected something animal. The man stares past Casimir, eyes fixed ahead in their wide-boned cheeks, the roar echoing away around them. There is something in his bunched left hand, the long nails curled around it. Shiny, a vestigial metal finger.

  ‘Casimir!’

  He runs harder. Methodical, making himself move. He hears the carer’s breathing and laughter bubbles up inside him. The hysteria is not unpleasant but exciting, like the thrill of a childhood game. A hunt in the backwoods, Piotr’s laughter echoing away through the stilted forest light. Now he can feel the muscles in his back spasming, expecting pain.

  There is a hole in the darkness ahead. He has looked up to see it several times before he takes it in as the tunnel’s end. Beyond it are platform lights. The bright, dark clothes of an evening crowd. The distant glitter of a timetable light-board.

  He comes out into bright light. Its clear surface falls across him and he gulps at it, not looking back at the tunnel’s mouth. Alice is beside him, kneeling in the thin crowd, and she reaches down and helps him up. There is panicked laughter and whispering around them. The small, clear voices of children.

  The human noise seems peripheral, as if part of him is still running. Casimir presses his face against Alice, breathing in the smell of her neck. Against his face, the hardness of her collarbone under the skin.

  ‘Daddy, are they Underground people?’

  He opens his eyes. There are two small girls watching him. The same dark irises, dark plaited hair. Their father pulls them back into the gathered platform crowd.

  ‘What’s the Underground lady saying, Daddy?’

  ‘The man’s got all blood on his feet.’

  Casimir feels the wetness on his calves, colder and more painful where the jeans touch the flesh. The wounds there have reopened and he remembers the dog woman, days ago. Don’t hurt my lurching girls. Alice is talking to him, close and urgent.

  ‘Casimir, come on. Please don’t stop now.’

  He shakes his head to clear it. Looks round at the tunnel mouth. There is no sign of anyone following. Nothing except the line-lights, bright beads strung out into the dark curve.

  ‘He could come out another way. Could he do that? He could be anywhere. Casimir?’

  Over the heads of the crowd he can see a cross-tunnel bridge. It cuts straight and high across the platform’s curvature. There are people there, not looking down, hurrying on to other platforms and destinations. Beyond the bridge is a sign in green, EMERGENCY EXIT; beyond that, the control room’s passage entrance.

  ‘The control room. We will watch for him.’

  Casimir starts towards the passage, Alice just ahead of him, almost running. The crowd moves away from them both. Trying not to touch.

  The control-room door is unlocked and Ca
simir goes straight in, heading for the camera screens. Weaver is by the equipment racks, changing into orange tunnel overalls. A skinny figure in white Y-fronts, his back blotched with wine-stain birthmarks. He looks round, gawping at Alice.

  ‘Who are you? Cass, is she public? You can’t have her in here if she’s public –’

  ‘Weaver, listen to me.’ Casimir leans over the counter, monitor light dulling his face. The four platforms curve away on their separate screens. They are almost empty, a few weekday late-nighters clustered by exits and entrances. ‘You must call the police. Tell them – just tell them to come. Weaver?’

  The worker is staring at Alice. His face is blotched red and white as he blushes. ‘You look just like them. The woman who fell and the other one. What’s your name?’

  ‘Alice.’

  She has stopped moving. Watching him. Casimir keeps his eyes on the screens.

  ‘Hurry now. Call the police at Kentish Town. The number –’

  ‘Yeah, all right. I know the number.’ The trainee’s voice is puzzled but light, accepting. There are cellular telephones slung from the equipment rack and he reaches one down, fumbling with the buttons. Alice comes up beside Casimir. She cranes back to see the screens.

  ‘He could go away again. He could wait for us.’

  He remembers the carer’s face and, more than that, his screaming. A basic, animal sound. On the screens, three of the tunnel mouths are dark. The fourth is beaded with line-lights. A few people still wait there, peering into the half-dark.

  ‘Sir? I can’t get through to them, it’s busy.’

  ‘Ring 999. Explain to them.’

  Casimir’s voice is soft with concentration as his eyes go from screen to screen. In his mind he imagines the carer crawling up on to the platforms.

  But there is nothing to see. A train comes in, heading south through the City. Pulls away from an emptied platform. Casimir feels his breathing becoming even and slow. The image is so familiar and mundane.

  ‘Cass? What am I explaining again?’

  He turns towards Weaver. The trainee flinches away as he grabs the telephone. There is blood on his hands, where they have touched his trousers. His fingers leave tacky print marks on the cell’s green-lit buttons as he starts to dial.

  Behind him Alice starts to talk. Her voice is quiet, conversational.

  ‘He’s still here. Here he is. Come and see.’

  Casimir pushes the cellular phone back at Weaver as the line connects. Runs to the counter, eyes jittering between monitors. Alice’s voice is soft, as if the carer might hear her through the screens.

  ‘He came out of a different tunnel. He could be anywhere now.’

  Casimir doesn’t answer. His eyes are settling on one of the cross-tunnel screens. A man runs under the camera’s steep angle and goes up the emergency stairwell, out of sight. The camera blurs his movement and the heavy, rounded shoulders, a grey trail fading behind the figure as it disappears up the spiral.

  ‘There.’ Her voice is a sigh. As if seeing the carer relieves her of something.

  ‘I saw him.’

  ‘The stairs only go up, don’t they? We could catch him.’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t think there is another way –’ Casimir stops talking, features relaxing.

  He goes over to the equipment racks. His work jacket hangs torn down one side and he takes it off and puts on an orange visibility vest. There is a pair of his work boots at the rack’s foot. He shucks off his shoes and pulls on the boots, glad of their thick rubber soles. There is a bunch of emergency keys and he takes them too, sliding the cold metal into his pocket.

  He turns round, taking in the room. Weaver standing, his thin chest still bare. Alice sitting on the counter, her knees together and her shoulders hunched up; watching him and saying nothing. Casimir wants her to say something. To tell him to take care. Anything will do.

  ‘Weaver. There is someone I have to find.’ He reaches out and takes the telephone. ‘I know where he is. Stay here with Alice. Don’t leave her.’

  The trainee stares sideways at Alice, as if she might jump at him, mad as the dog woman. ‘What about the police? I can call them again.’

  ‘I don’t need them. I can do it myself.’ Casimir clips the telephone to his belt. It bangs against his thigh as he walks to the door. A familiar weight, reassuring. ‘Watch the screens while I’m gone. Call me if you see him.’

  ‘Casimir.’

  He looks back. Alice hasn’t moved. There is nothing in her face he understands. ‘Take off the vest. You don’t want to be seen.’

  He stares back at her, not breaking the gaze. Reaches back over his head, pulling off the bright orange material. When she says nothing else he opens the door and goes out without looking back.

  It’s not long until closing time. He can hear it in the cross-tunnel, the sound of the station hollowing out, the few last footsteps becoming isolated. Casimir turns past locked doors and the dirt-thick grilles of ventilation shafts. The air is cloyed with the smell of cooling kitchens above, Camden restaurants winding down for the night.

  There are so many doors, he thinks. He passes them as he reaches the emergency staircase. The walled-up lift portals, the substation entrance. Storerooms and the metal shutters of old cross-passages. So many places to hide. He goes slowly, listening to the station, moving up the metal spiral of cross-hatched steps.

  Ten feet up there is another doorway in the shaft wall. Its metal surface has been painted over, not once but many times, the yellowed surface itself scrawled with graffiti four or five layers thick. The mortise lock is covered with paint, up to the keyhole’s circular rim.

  Casimir tries to imagine how many times he has passed this way, the daily pattern of work making him part of the crowd. It is hard for him to see the deep-shelter door in detail. Familiarity has faded it. He screws up his eyes. Leans close. Looks up.

  The painted surface is no longer seamless. Running between the door and its jamb is a fine line, the paint not chipped or cracked but evenly cut through. To Casimir the detail seems odd in its care and violence. He imagines the carer, out of sight, bent forward. His knife opening out like butterfly wings.

  He takes the keyring out of his pocket and sorts out the familiar flanged shapes: platform tannoy, crawl-space, surface concourse. He has never been into the deep shelter this way, and he wastes time on three keys before trying a grooved stub of bluish steel. Casimir works it into the mortise lock. Turns it twice, opens the door and steps through.

  The smell and the dark hit him together and he raises his hands against them. The deep-shelter air is sour here, as if the trapped dust has fermented over decades. There is no wind on Casimir’s face. The bottled-up air hangs around him, pungent as battery acid. He reaches out his hands, feeling along the walls until he finds a panel of light switches.

  He flicks them on. At the end of a short corridor is another staircase, spiralling down. Keeled over by the stairwell is a block of machinery, LAMSON PNEUMATIC COMMUNICATION cast into its side.

  He walks to the stairwell. The shaft is narrow, and Casimir can see down less than ten feet. But there is a sense of space below. The sound of an Underground train comes through the stone and is carried on into the intervening air. Casimir starts towards the staircase, clumsy with anxiety. One boot clangs against the side of the communication machine.

  There is a skittering from below. A rhythm made quiet. The sound of something alive. Casimir follows it down and out, into the deep shelter.

  He is standing at the far side the upper hall, thirty feet across from Wanda’s red cage-work lift. Casimir’s footsteps whisper ahead of him as he starts to walk, northwards, between the shelves and aisles. The neon strip lighting is dead, but Casimir’s switch has turned on a series of emergency lights. He recognizes their grille-work brackets, like those in the train tunnels above.

  There are other sounds now, softer than those Casimir makes walking. The drip-drop of water falling, far ahead and out of sight. A whirr
of ventilation fans, somewhere off in the lengths and turns of the Underground.

  Casimir stops by one of the shelves. The wooden frames are familiar now; they are bunk-beds, plain and functional, like those in South Kentish Town. There is space here for thousands of people, he thinks. He goes on under the bars of emergency light.

  After some minutes he comes to the end of the archives. Beyond is the empty hall. The line-lights trail off into the distance, clear as a runway. By their illumination Casimir can see stalactites, very white and thin, longer than those in the abandoned station. Storage units, big as truck trailers, their labelled doors locked and dark.

  He takes a step away from the archives. There is a difference in the quality of the air here. A greater humidity, a wet coldness and the smell of lime. The environment changing, as if Casimir is swimming out over some oceanic shelf.

  The lights help him. It is easier to keep going with the light strung out above him. For a long time he cannot see the chamber’s end, and then it looms up abruptly. Casimir reaches a hand out to the flat black concrete. Spurs and surfaces of metal stick out and upwards in three places, as if a massive piece of machinery has been walled up inside. A staircase leads down to the left, light filtering up from the floor below.

  It is like being under water, Casimir thinks. Underground and under water are not so different. There is the need to see everything that is hidden, and the desire to get back up to the light. The desire to get out is stronger now. Casimir takes a deep breath, shuddering, glad of the air. Then he goes down the narrow stairs.

  The deep shelter’s base is more cramped than the hall above, the ground levelled out several feet above the tunnelling machine’s original curve. Many of the lights have burnt out, patches of brightness and dark scattered into the distance.