by Mike Carey
We were both pretty near stony, as it turned out – I should have kept one of those fifties back for emergencies – so my first idea of grabbing a cab down to the Strand foundered on an absence of hard cash. We used our travel-cards from earlier in the day instead, taking the Circle back round to King’s Cross and then changing to the Piccadilly Line. But Holborn was closed because of a suspect package, so we were booted off at Russell Square and had to walk the rest of the way.
That didn’t feel like much of a hardship. The day had been another scorcher, and even this late in the evening, with the rush-hour crowds long gone, the train had smelled like one titanic armpit. It was a relief to walk in the cooling air, and to feel the city poised on that luminous knife-edge where day becomes night. There was still light in the sky, but the buildings were black masses on either side of us, the occasional still-open shop looking like a cave in a cliff face.
Another dark mass rose ahead of us, and it took me a moment to realise what it was. When I did, I stopped dead and stared at it in blank-faced wonder.
Trudie looked at me curiously, then followed my gaze. The same penny dropped a moment later.
‘Mary, mother of us!’ she whispered.
London hasn’t had a tram system since before the Second World War, but some of the infrastructure is still kicking around. You can see stretches of track in a hundred places where old street surfaces haven’t been asphalted over, or have been restored, and in my west London stamping ground the Acton tram depot, which looks like a Victorian siding shed with white-brick walls and a massive fan-vaulted ceiling, was still used for buses right up until last year.
What we were looking at was the north end of the Kingsway underpass – an underground tramway closed down in the 1940s. Later on, the council converted part of it into a tunnel for cars and buses coming from Aldwych by the simple expedient of building a new steel-and-cement corridor within the tiled and brick-built passage that already existed. The rest had been closed off and left to rot.
‘How did we miss it?’ Trudie demanded, amazed.
I was asking myself the same question. The answer – beyond ‘We’re thick as bricks and we can’t find our own arses without a map’ – was that the tunnel had no opening between Holborn and the river. This end was on Southampton Row, a couple of hundred yards up from Holborn station, and the other end was somewhere on the Embankment west of Waterloo Bridge. Both ends were closed off now, and apart from this short stretch of black stone parapet wall there was nothing to show on the surface that the tunnel was there.
We looked at each other, probably thinking in tandem. If this was where Asmodeus was hiding, then going inside with the light failing and no torch was probably insane. On the other hand, with the demon still out of town, this might be the best chance we were ever going to get.
‘Do you feel anything?’ I asked Trudie.
She raised her hands in front of her face, fingers flicking back and forth, weaving complex traceries out of her looped strings. ‘Nothing,’ she said tersely. ‘How about you?’
‘Nothing,’ I admitted. ‘You think we should call J-J?’
‘I think we should go in,’ Trudie said without a moment’s hesitation. ‘We don’t know when Asmodeus will be back. If we wait for the MOU people to get here, he might arrive first and get a whiff of us somehow. The best thing would be to find out exactly where he’s been hiding, then back off. When he goes in, we seal the exits and pump OPG or Tabun in – incapacitate him at a distance.’
It sounded good to me. I looked at my watch. Almost eleven. If the timing worked out, we could even kill two birds with one stone. When we called Gil in to lay an ambush for Asmodeus, he’d have to call off the Super-Self raid. Then I could come back tomorrow and try out my secret weapon in daylight, with the wind at my back.
‘Let’s do it,’ I said.
15
The tramway tunnel slopes down from the regular road surface at an angle of about twenty degrees. For the first fifty yards or so, it’s not a tunnel at all because it’s open to the sky; it’s just a cobblestoned ramp, bordered on either side by black stone walls, with wrought-iron gates closing it off from the street.
We didn’t bother checking to see whether the gates were locked. The walls were low enough to climb, and Trudie was way ahead of me, already vaulting up one-handed onto the parapet and then dropping silently on the further side. A couple of passers-by gave us a curious look as I clambered after her, but they didn’t challenge us and I thought it was unlikely they’d dial 999. More likely than not, they’d think we were looking for a private spot to do some dogging.
Trudie walked on down the ramp, but stopped when she came to the tunnel opening. The gates here looked a lot more solid, and since they reached to within an inch or so of the tunnel roof, they couldn’t be climbed.
Trudie rattled them experimentally, then turned to me as I came up beside her. ‘Did you bring your lock picks?’ she asked.
I shook my head. Picking locks was a hobby of mine, dating back to a doomed attempt in my early twenties to make my name as a stage magician. I always appreciated a chance to keep my hand in, but I tended not to carry my burglary kit with me unless I knew I was going to use it. I’d had too many painful brushes with the long arm and short temper of the law to court any more of them when I didn’t have to.
It was impossible to see anything beyond the gates. We were entirely below the level of the street now, and almost no light filtered this far down. Perhaps that was why it took me a few seconds to see what was staring me in the face. The big padlock on the lower gates had been twisted with immense force, until the hasp had snapped off clean at one end, and then hung loosely in place again on the chain so that it looked as though the gates were still secured.
I slipped it off and let it fall to the ground, then took the chain and pulled it through the gates’ central uprights. I pushed the gate open, wincing a little at the loud squealing of the hinges even though I knew there was nobody inside. I bowed and threw out my free hand, inviting Trudie to go through first.
‘We’re not going to be able to see much,’ she pointed out as she crossed the threshold.
‘That depends,’ I muttered. I slipped through the gates behind her and pulled them to. ‘They connected all the lights back up for an art installation a few years back – something to do with the twentieth anniversary of 1984. Pen covered it for the Art Attacks webzine. If we’re lucky, there’ll be a switch somewhere.’
There wasn’t, or at least not at first. We advanced into the gloom, skirting huge grey bags full of builders’ rubble and canted stacks of MEN AT WORK signs. Dead leaves from seasons past didn’t so much crunch as sigh under our feet, crumbling instantly into dust like vampires caught out at dawn. There was no obvious sign that anyone had been here recently before us, but I put my trust in the broken padlock and kept on going.
For the first ten feet or so, the walls were whitewashed particle board; beyond that, the tiles of the original tunnel appeared. At the point where they joined, I found the switch at ground level and threw it. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the lights woke slowly, dithering in spastic strobe before finally settling for on.
The tunnel gaped open in front of us like the gullet of Leviathan. It was unnerving, a trompe l’oeil in reverse, opening up a third dimension where the wall of darkness had seemed flat and solid and close to. Half a mile or more to the river, and the underpass went all the way there. This would be a bad place to get caught with the demon between us and the outside world.
I turned to Trudie. ‘Stay here,’ I told her. ‘Keep lookout for me.’
She met my gaze squarely.
‘No,’ she said.
‘This is a dead end.’
‘I don’t care, Castor. If he comes back, the two of us together have got a better chance of staying alive.’
I was going to argue the toss because she was flat-out wrong on that one, but she forestalled me by walking ahead into the tunnel. I had no c
hoice but to follow.
Without discussion, Trudie took one side of the tunnel and I took the other. We moved fast, scanning walls and floor for any obvious breaks, openings or trapdoors. The dust underfoot deadened the echoes of our footfalls, but the sound of our breathing came back to us, amplified and distorted, from the tunnel’s further end, adding to the illusion that we were being swallowed alive.
We kept moving, roughly in sync. I was setting a good pace, but Trudie’s long stride easily matched mine. There was no sign of any opening off the tunnel ahead of us; it seemed to extend into unfathomable distance.
Then I spotted the mouth of a cross-way. It was invisible from a distance because the white-tiled tunnel wall stood proud at that point, concealing the actual opening until we were very close to it.
We quickened our pace until we reached the intersection. The right-hand tunnel was blocked after about ten feet by a concrete wall that looked fairly new. Road signs and traffic cones were stacked in this shallow space in great profusion. On our left the side tunnel went on for about twenty feet and then angled sharply, again to the left.
It made sense to cover this side branch first, rather than leave it to be explored on on the return leg. We walked quickly to the corner, skirting it widely to avoid being surprised.
Ahead of us there were only a further ten feet of corridor, ending in another wall of grey concrete. Set into it was a door, over which a sign – hanging slightly askew – read THAMES FLOOD CONTROL CENTRE.
‘That’s just surreal,’ I muttered.
‘It’s obsolete,’ Trudie answered, her voice pitched as low as mine. ‘Before they built the Thames Barrier, every borough had its own flood warning centre. This must have been where Camden’s was based.’
We tried the door, found it locked, and went back to the main corridor. As we advanced now, I became aware that there was something wrong with the endless perspective of the tunnel ahead of us. The proportions were subtly – and then not so subtly – off true. A few moments later, Trudie muttered a profanity.
‘The ceiling is closing in on us,’ she said.
She was right. It had been high above our heads when we started, but now it was almost close enough to touch. As I stared up at it, I heard a distant basso rumble.
‘The road tunnel,’ I said. ‘They built it inside the shell of the underpass. The road is right over our heads here.’
This stretch of the tunnel was more untidy, with piles of bricks, steel buckets and even the occasional hammer or trowel stacked against the wall or casually dropped on the floor. Dead leaves had drifted in ragged heaps against all of these objects, giving each of them its own dull brown comet tail.
We kept on moving, and the distance between floor and ceiling kept on narrowing, so that after another couple of minutes we were having to stoop. It was hard to fight off a feeling of claustrophobia. Trudie reached up and touched the underside of a manhole cover, gave it a tentative push, but it was rusted into place. It was obvious it hadn’t been opened in decades.
Up to now the air had smelled only of dust and damp stonework, but in this stretch of the tunnel it had curdled into something much more unpleasant: a sweet-sour tang like rotting vegetables, overlaid with something hard-edged and chemical. It was subtle at first, but it intensified as we went forward.
Up ahead it now looked as though the converging perspective lines met within a few hundred yards, rather than at some distant horizon. I was about to make some remark about running out of road and suggest we turn back, when I realised that I’d been tricked again by the flat light and the ubiquitous white tiles.
The floor and the ceiling didn’t actually meet at all. At the point where we would have had to go down on all fours and crawl to keep moving forward, the corridor ended at a letterbox-shaped opening about two feet high but stretching across the full width of the underpass. Just in front of it, on Trudie’s side of the corridor, a dark irregular mass resolved itself as we approached into a human body.
This was where the rotting-vegetable smell was coming from, and Trudie covered her mouth with her hand as she knelt to examine it. I crossed the tunnel to look over her shoulder.
The raincoat, piebald Doc Martens and grubby workmen’s trousers with pockets on the knees gave the overall impression that the body was that of a man; otherwise it would have been hard to say. He’d been dead a long time, which meant that rats and flies and the elements and the chemicals inside his own body had had their way with him. What flesh was left looked dry and mummified: one side of his face was staved in almost flat; from the other side, where most of the flesh had fallen or been picked away, the empty orb of his eye socket stared up at us with an expression of innocent surprise. He’d left no ghost to warn our death-sense that he was there, and mercifully he hadn’t risen in the flesh. There was nothing left of him except this sad ruin, and the smell.
‘Homeless guy,’ Trudie surmised, probably on the evidence of the boots. ‘How do you think he died?’
‘I think we can rule out natural causes,’ I said grimly.
I pointed to the tunnel wall above the man’s head. A dark stain on the tiles there had dried black, but with dark red highlights still visible here and there. It was shaped like an exploding firework, rising up on a slender column to blossom out in all directions. But the column had come last, of course. That was where the tramp had slithered down the wall after Asmodeus had slammed his head into it hard enough to shatter his skull.
It was Asmodeus; there was no reason to doubt that any more. The dead man might have left no echo of himself in this place, but the demon’s sickly essence hung around us now like a pall, and I knew it beyond all possibility of mistake. He hadn’t just passed through here; he’d lingered, and made himself at home. Trudie’s face showed that she felt it too. We’d struck the mother lode.
Without a word, we ducked and clambered through the narrow opening into a much larger space beyond. This was where the corridor ended, in a concrete wall about twenty feet ahead of us, but it came out beyond the road tunnel here, so it resumed its full height for this last stretch. What we were in was like a room whose only doorway was the one we’d just entered through.
It was even furnished, after a fashion. There was a grubby mattress on the floor, a sleeping bag on top of it, both of which must once have belonged to the poor bastard outside. In the near corner a dozen or so overstuffed carrier bags clustered like chubby little children cowering from an ogre: the dead man’s worldly goods.
But these melancholy, mundane details were pushed to the edges of my attention by the sight of the far wall, at which Trudie was staring open-mouthed. The chemical stench was stronger here. It was coming from a sprawl of pots and cans at the base of the wall, and from the wall itself, where Asmodeus had made himself busy.
From floor to ceiling, the space was covered with symbols, with words and with wards. The words were in Aramaic, so I couldn’t make them out, but the design was instantly familiar. A downward-pointing pentagram, with aleph sigils at the point of each arm and radiating lines fanning out across the negative spaces between the arms. Even if Nicky hadn’t listed those features for me, I would have known it. Whoever had drawn these designs had also left the unidentified wards in Pen’s drive, under Juliet’s hedge and on the roof of the Gaumont.
‘Tsukelit,’ Trudie spelled out. ‘Ket. Ilalliel. Jetaniul. Tlallik. Aketsulitur. Castor, do you know any of these names?’
For a moment I didn’t; they were just sounds. But then the thing that all the sounds had in common drove itself into my brain like a railroad spike. I’d been way, way off, and so had Nicky. The common denominator had never been me. ‘I know all of those names,’ I said, my mouth suddenly dry. ‘Or at least I know who they belong to. Jesus Christ, this is—’
The lights went out before I could finish the sentence, plunging us into absolute blackness. A whole second later, snaking down the corridor like a whiplash, came the chunking sound of the switch being thrown.
‘
Fuck!’ Trudie gasped.
We were in the dark, half a mile away from the light switch, and we both knew who was out there, standing between us and the light, even before we heard the chilling boom of his laughter.
‘Run,’ I said tightly.
‘Run where?’ Trudie snarled. ‘We can’t see to run. Get out your whistle, Castor. Let’s give the bastard a fight at least.’
I found her arm in the dark, gripped it tightly and hauled her back towards the opening. ‘Not here,’ I said. ‘Not on his terms. He can see in the dark, Pax. If we stay here, we’re dead. Come on.’
She pulled back against me for a second, then gave in. We crawled on hands and knees back over the demon’s threshold into the corridor beyond. Trudie gave a sobbing cry of protest, which I took to mean that her hand had made contact with the corpse. I dragged her to her feet, though we still had to crouch, and set off at a stumbling jogtrot back up the tunnel.
It was hard to make myself move. I knew that Asmodeus was sprinting through the darkness towards us, fast and sure, homing on the smell of our souls. He could probably see us already, the way an eagle stooping over a meadow can find and focus on a fieldmouse in a square mile of tall grass.
‘Where are we going?’ Trudie demanded. ‘Castor, we’re going to run right into him!’
‘No we’re not,’ I muttered. I was still holding her wrist, but my other hand was running across the ceiling, fingers spread wide. When I couldn’t reach up high enough to touch it any more, I knew we’d gone too far. Quickly I retraced my steps, again yanking hard on Trudie’s arm. There! There it was!
‘What are you—?’ she demanded.
‘Here,’ I said, cutting across her. ‘Help me.’
It was the manhole we’d found earlier, the only way back up to the surface that didn’t involve getting past Asmodeus. Groping blindly in the dark, I’d finally found the outline of it, and now I put her hands on it too. ‘Push,’ I commanded.