I pushed on through the platforms, checking arrival times on the indicator boards, searching the blank faces of passengers, trying not to think about the penumbral tunnels beyond. For a moment I caught sight of the silver rails curving away to the platform’s tiled maw, and a fresh wave of nausea overcame me. I forced myself to think about the children.
You can usually trace the person who has graffitied their desk because you have a ready-made sample of their handwriting, and most kids are lousy at disguising their identities. Wooden pencil boxes get used by quiet creative types. Metal tins with cartoon characters are for extroverts. Children who use psychedelic holders covered in graffiti usually think they’re streetwise, but they’re not.
You always used to be able to tell the ones who smoked because blazers were made of a peculiar wool-blend that trapped the smell of cigarettes. Now everyone’s different. Spots around a child’s nose and mouth often indicate a glue-sniffer, but now so many have spots from bad diets, from stress, from neglect. Some children never—
He was standing just a few yards away.
The navy-blue raincoat was gabardine, like a fifties school-child’s regulation school coat, but in an adult size. Below this were black trousers with creases and turn-ups, freshly polished Oxford toecap shoes. His hair was slicked smartly back, trimmed in classic short-back-and-sides fashion by a traditional barber who had tapered the hair at the nape and used an open razor on the neck. You always notice the haircuts.
He was holding the boy’s hand. He turned his head and looked through me, scanning the platform. The air caught in my lungs as he brought his focus back to me, and matched my features in his memory. His deep-set eyes were framed by rimless spectacles that removed any readable emotion from his face. He held my gaze defiantly. We stood frozen on the concourse, staring at each other as the other passengers surged around us, and as Connor’s head slowly turned to follow his new friend’s sight line, I saw that this man was exhilarated by the capture of his quarry, just as I knew that his initial elation would turn by degrees to sadness and then to anger, as deep and dark as the tunnels themselves.
The tension between their hands grew tighter. He began to move away, pulling the boy. I looked for someone to call to, searching faces to find anyone who might help, but found indifference as powerful as any enemy. Dull eyes reflected the platform lights, slack flesh settled on heavy bodies, exuding sour breath, and suddenly man and boy were moving fast, and I was pushing my way through an army of statues as I tried to keep the pair of them in my sight.
I heard the train before I saw it arriving at the end of the pedestrian causeway between us, the billow of heavy air resonating in the tunnel like a depth charge. I felt the pressure change in my ears and saw them move more quickly now. For a moment I thought he was going to push the boy beneath the wheels, but I knew he had barely begun with Connor yet.
I caught the doors just as they closed. Connor and the man had made it to the next carriage, and were standing between teenaged tourists, only becoming visible as the tunnel curved and the carriage swung into view, briefly aligning the windows. We remained in stasis, quarry, hunter and pursuer, as the train thundered on. My heart tightened as the driver applied the brakes and we began to slow down. Ahead, the silver lines twisted sinuously toward King’s Cross, and another wall of bodies flashed into view.
As the doors opened, fresh swells of passengers surged from carriage to platform and platform to carriage, shifting and churning so much that I was almost lifted from my feet. I kept my eyes focused on the man and the boy even though it meant stumbling against the human tide. Still he did not run, but moved firmly forward in a brisk walk, never slowing or stopping to look back. The carriage speakers were still barking inanely about delays and escalators. I could find no voice of my own that would rise above them, no power that would impede their escape. Wherever they went, I could only follow.
V: Euston to Camden Town
Once, on the other side of that century of devastating change, Oscar Wilde could have taken the Tube to West End. The Underground was built before the invention of the telephone, before the invention of the fountain pen. Once, the platform walls were lined with advertisements for Bovril, Emu, Wrights Coal Tar Soap, for the Quantock Sanitary Laundry, Peckham, and the Blue Hall Cinema, Edgware Road, for Virol, Camp Coffee and Lifebuoy, for Foster Clark’s Soups and Cream Custards, and Eastman’s Dyeing & Cleaning. These were replaced by pleas to Make Do And Mend, to remember that Loose Lips Sink Ships, that Walls Have Ears, that Coughs And Sneezes Spread Diseases. Urgent directional markers guided the way to bomb shelters, where huddled families and terrified eyes watched and flinched with each thunderous impact that shook and split the tiles above their heads.
On through the tunnels and passages, miles of stained cream tiles, over the bridges that linked the lines. I watched the navy-blue raincoat shifting from side to side until I could see nothing else, my own fears forgotten, my fury less latent than his, building with the passing crush of lives. Onto another section of the Northern Line, the so-called Misery Line, but now the battered decadence of its maroon rolling stock had been replaced with livery of dull graffiti-scrubbed silver, falsely modern, just ordinary. The maroon trains had matched the outside tiles of the stations, just as the traffic signs of London were once striped black and white. No such style left now, of course, just ugly-ordinary and invisible-ordinary. But he was not ordinary, he wanted something he could not have, something nobody was allowed to take. On through the gradually thinning populace to another standing train, this one waiting with its doors open. But they began to close as we reached them, and we barely made the jump, the three of us, before we were sealed inside.
What had he told the boy to make him believe? It did not matter what had been said, only that he had seen the child’s weakness and known which role he had to play: anxious relative, urgent family friend, trusted guide, helpful teacher. To a child like Connor he could be anything as long as he reassured. Boys like Connor longed to reach up toward a strong clasping hand. They needed to believe.
Out onto the platform, weaving through the climbing passengers, across the concourse at Euston and back down where we had come from, toward another northbound train. We had been travelling on the Edgware branch, but it wasn’t where he wanted to go. Could he be anxious to catch a High Barnet train for some reason? By now I had deliberately passed several guards without calling out for help, because I felt sure they would only argue and question and hinder, and in the confusion to explain I would lose the boy for ever. My decision was vindicated, because the seconds closed up on us as the High Barnet train slid into the station. By now I had gained pace enough to reach the same carriage, and I stood facing his back, no more than a dozen passengers away. And this time I was foolish enough to call out.
My breathless voice did not carry far. A few people turned to look at me with anxious curiosity. One girl appeared to be on the edge of offering her help, but the man I was pointing to had suddenly vanished from sight, and so had the boy, and suddenly I was just another crazy woman on the Tube, screaming paranoia, accusing innocents.
At Camden Town the doors mercifully opened, releasing the nauseous crush that was closing in on me. I stuck out my head and checked along the platform, but they did not alight. I could not see them. What had happened? Could they have pushed through the connecting door and – God help the child – dropped down onto the track below? They had to be on board, and so I had to stay on. The doors closed once more and we pulled away again into the suffocating darkness.
VI: Kentish Town to South Kentish Town
The tunnels withstood the firestorms above. The tunnels protected. At the heart of the system was the Inner Circle, far from a circle in the Euclidean sense, instead an engineering marvel that navigated the damp earth and ferried its people through the sulphurous tunnels between iron cages, impervious to the world above, immune to harm. Appropriately, the great metal circles that protected workers as they hacked at the clay walls
were known as shields. They protected then, and the strength of the system still protects. The tunnels still endure.
He had dropped down to his knees beside the boy, whispering his poisons. I had missed him between the bodies of standing, rocking travellers, but I was ready as the train slowed to a halt at Kentish Town. I was surprised to see that the platform there was completely deserted. Suddenly the landscape had cleared. As he led the boy out I could tell that Connor was now in distress, pulling against the hand that held him, but it was no good; his captor had strength and leverage. No more than five or six other passengers alighted. I called out, but my voice was lost beneath the rumble and squeal of rolling steel. There were no guards. Someone must see us on the closed-circuit cameras, I thought, but how would eyes trained for rowdy teenaged gangs see danger here? There was just a child, a man, and a frightened middle-aged woman.
I glanced back at the platform exit as the train pulled out, wondering how I could stop him if he tried to push past. When I looked back, he and Connor had vanished. He was below on the line, helping the child down, and then they were running, stumbling into the entrance of the tunnel.
We were about to move beyond the boundaries of the city, into a territory of shadows and dreams. As I approached the entrance I saw the silver lines slithering away into amber gloom, then darkness, and a wave of apprehension flushed through me. By dangling my legs over the platform and carefully lowering myself, I managed to slide down into the dust-caked gully. I knew that the raised rail with the ceramic studs was live, and that I would have to stay at the outer edge. I was also sure that the tunnel would reveal alcoves for workers to stand in when trains passed by. In the depth of my fear I was colder and more logical than I had been for years. Perhaps by not calling to the guards, by revealing myself in pursuit, I had in some way brought us here, so that now I was the child’s only hope.
The boy was pulling hard against his stiff-legged warden, shouting something upwards, but his voice was distorted by the curving tunnel walls. They slowed to a walk, and I followed. The man was carrying some kind of torch; he had been to this place before, and had prepared himself accordingly. My eyes followed the dipping beam until we reached a division in the tunnel wall. He veered off sharply and began to pick a path through what appeared to be a disused section of the line. Somewhere in the distance a train rattled and reverberated in its concrete causeway. My feet were hurting, and I had scraped the back of my leg on the edge of the platform. I could feel a thin hot trickle of blood behind my knee. The thick brown air smelled of dust and desiccation, like the old newspapers you find under floorboards. It pressed against my lungs, so that my breath could only be reached in shallow catches. Ahead, the torch beam shifted and hopped. He had climbed a platform and pulled the boy up after him.
As I came closer, his beam illuminated a damaged soot-grey sign: SOUTH KENTISH TOWN. The station had been closed for almost eighty years. What remained had been preserved by the dry warm air. The platform walls were still lined to a height of four feet with dark green tiles arranged in column patterns. Every movement Connor made could be heard clearly here. His shoes scuffed on the litter-strewn stone as he tried to yank his hand free. He made small mewling noises, like a hungry cat.
Suddenly the torch beam illuminated a section of stairway tiled in cream and dark red. They turned into it. I stopped sharply and listened. He had stopped, too. I moved as quickly and quietly as I could to the stairway entrance.
He was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, his fingers glowing pink over the lens of the upright torch. Connor was by his side, pressed against the wall. It was then I realized that Connor usually wore glasses – you can usually tell the children who do. I imagined they would be like the ones worn by his captor. Because I was suddenly struck by how very alike they looked, as though the man was the boy seen some years later. I knew then that something terrible had happened here before and could so easily happen again, that this damaged creature meant harm because he had been harmed himself, because he was fighting to recapture something pure, and that he knew it could never again be. He wanted his schooldays back but the past was denied to him, and he thought he could recapture the sensations of childhood by taking someone else’s.
I would not let the boy have it stolen from him. Innocence is not lost; it is taken.
‘You can’t have him,’ I said, keeping my voice as clear and rational as I could. I had always known how to keep my fear from showing. It is one of the first things you learn as a teacher. He did not move. One hand remained over the torch, the other over the boy’s right hand.
‘I know you were happy then. But you’re not in class any more.’ I raised my tone to a punitive level. ‘He’s not in your year. You belong somewhere different.’
‘Whose teacher are you?’ He cocked his head on one side to study me, uncurling his fingers from the torch. Light flooded the stairway.
‘I might have been yours,’ I admitted.
He dropped the boy’s hand, and Connor fell to the floor in surprise.
‘The past is gone,’ I said quietly. ‘Lessons are over. I really think you should go now.’ For a moment the air was only disturbed by my uneven breath and the sound of water dripping somewhere far above.
He made a small sound, like the one Connor had made earlier, but deeper, more painful. As he approached me I forced myself to stand my ground. It was essential to maintain a sense of authority. I felt sure he was going to hit me, but instead he stopped and studied my face in the beam of the torch, trying to place my features. I have one of those faces; I could be anyone’s teacher. Then he lurched out of the stairwell and stumbled away along the platform. With my heart hammering, I held Connor to me until the sound of the man was lost in the labyrinth behind us.
‘You’re the Crocodile Lady,’ said Connor, looking up at me.
‘I think I am,’ I agreed, wiping a smudge from his forehead.
Unable to face the tunnels again, I climbed the stairs with Connor until we reached a door, and I hammered on it until someone unlocked the damned thing. It was opened by a surprised Asian girl dressed only in a towel. We left the building via the basement of the Omega Sauna, Kentish Town Road, which still uses the station’s old spiral staircase as part of its design. London has so many secrets.
The police think they know who he is now, but I’m not sure that they’ll ever catch him. He’s as lost to them as he is to everyone else. Despite his crimes – and they have uncovered quite a few – something inside me felt sorry for him, and sorry for the part he’d lost so violently that it had driven him to take the same from others. The hardest thing to learn is how to be strong.
Everyone calls me the Crocodile Lady.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
All for Sale
RAMSEY CAMPBELL HAS BEEN NAMED Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association. A film of his novel Pact of the Fathers is in development in Spain from director Jaime Balagueró, The Darkest Part of the Woods is his latest supernatural novel, and he is currently working on another, The Overnight.
Campbell’s M.R. Jamesian anthology Meddling With Ghosts is published by The British Library, and he has co-edited Gathering the Bones with Jack Dann and Dennis Etchison. S.T. Joshi’s study Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction is available from Liverpool University Press, while Ramsey Campbell, Probably is a large non-fiction collection from PS Publishing.
‘The germ of this tale came from our first stay in Turkey,’ remembers the author, ‘where one morning our hotel in Kusadasi proved to have been surrounded overnight by a market.
‘Another detail dates from the 1980s, when the swarthy proprietor of a large television and video shop on London’s Tottenham Court Road where I was browsing did indeed take hold of my tits and declare “You are nice” (much to the outrage of my old editor Nick Austin when I told him over a Greek lunch at the Lord Byron, now defunct, alas). The first draft of the story was written in the
mornings of two weeks in August 2001, on the terrace of an apartment in Petra on Lesvos.’
ONCE THEY WERE OUTSIDE THE Mediterranean Nights Barry could hear the girl’s every word, starting with ‘What were you trying to tell me about a plane?’
‘Just I, you know, noticed you on it.’
‘As I said if you heard, I saw you.’
‘I know. I mean, I did hear, just about.’ While he gazed at rather than into her dark moonlit eyes that might be glinting with eagerness for him to risk more, he made himself blurt ‘I hoped I’d see you again.’
‘Well, now you have.’ She raised her small face an inch closer to his and formed her pink lips into a prominent smile he couldn’t quite take as an invitation to a kiss. Not long after his silence grew intolerable, unrelieved by the hushing of the waves that failed to distract him from the way the huge blurred scarcely muffled rhythm of the disco seemed determined to keep his heartbeat up to speed, she said ‘So you’re called Baz.’
‘That’s only what my friends call me, the guys I was with, I mean. I don’t know if you saw them on the plane as well.’
‘I told you, I saw you.’
Her gentle emphasis on the last word encouraged him to admit ‘I’m Barry really.’
‘Hello, Barry really,’ she said and held out a hand. ‘I’m Janet.’
He wiped his hand on his trousers, but they were as clammy from dancing. Her grasp proved to be cool and firm. ‘So are you staying as long as us?’ she said, having let go of him.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13 Page 16