The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  “What do you know about the disused stations here on the Northern Line? Have you seen the others for yourself?” Gray asked.

  “I know something. I’ve been in them all at one time or another. They have a bad reputation. The most significant is North End or the ‘Bull & Bush’ as the train operators like to call it.” Heath responded.

  “Why significant?”

  “The floodgates, y’know,” said Heath. “Instead of the tube station that was going to be there in 1906 they developed it into a central command centre. Certain stations on the network have the gates, but they’re all controlled from North End. Reckon the building goes down more than a thousand feet, though only the higher levels were initially used. It was started in the 1940s so they could stop the entire Underground system being flooded. Most of the gates were individually controlled before then.”

  “How could the whole system be flooded?”

  “If the Nazis had dropped a bomb in the Thames the tunnels under the river could have collapsed. Within ten minutes the Underground system would have been completely filled with water and submerged, y’know. Well, that’s what they said. Later on, in the early 1970s, they built a second zone of gates just outside stations like Shepherds Bush, Aldgate East and Bounds Green, before where the tracks emerge overground.”

  “What have they got to do with flooding?”

  “Nothing. But they thought people would go mental when the three-minute warnings went off and try to run along the tracks into the train tunnels to escape from Soviet atom bombs. Well, you get the idea . . .”

  By now they’d reached the emergency spiral stairway, which led much further downward to the lower lift landing. It was considerably steeper than the previous stairway and Gray kept a hand against the wall as the two men descended. Their footfalls echoed as if ghosts were following close behind.

  “Talking of weird stuff like that, you know about the Sentinel Train?” Heath asked. He didn’t wait for an answer before continuing with his topic, “First stop King William Street station along the abandoned spur, runs down to Borough without halting, then reverses up the Bank branch of the Northern Line. Only stops at the ghost stations along the route; nowhere else, goes on to City Road, right here to South Kentish Town, then back via Camden, before terminating at the deepest of all: North End, under Hamp-stead Heath. Anyway, I told you about that one, didn’t I? The Sentinel lets the inspection crews examine the stuff the public never sees. Company doesn’t leave the traction current to the rails on overnight, so a diesel locomotive pulls the old F Stock carriages. The train has a free run on the deserted tracks. Happens once a week or thereabouts. Every tube line has its own Sentinel.”

  “Are you pulling my leg?” Gray replied testily. “That’s straight out of Drayton’s book. It seems to me you must have read it.”

  They’d reached the lower lift landing.

  “This passageway leads to the north and southbound platforms,” Heath said, “but they’re long gone.”

  Were the idea not totally ridiculous Gray could have mistaken his companion for something dressed up in a boiler suit in order to pass as human. His colleagues at the Yard would have laughed at his suspicion. But he could not shake off the impression that, in the darkness, Heath’s appearance was genuinely similar to the figure that Gray had glimpsed peering out of the trellised gates of Kentish Town Station. That was only a few nights ago and one stop along the Northern Line from this ghost station. He’d seen it with his own eyes and the experience was not drawn from the pages of a crazy book like The Secret Underground. Gray could easily believe that this character Heath had not just read the volume but had stepped out from its pages into life.

  “You didn’t answer my question.” Gray said. From his coat pocket he drew a packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes.

  “What one was that again?” Heath snuffled.

  “The one about having read The Secret Underground.” Gray responded as he jammed one of the smokes between his lips and touched the end with the flame from a battered old Zippo. A faint smell of petrol wafted from the lighter. He drew on the cigarette and exhaled, sending curling blue smoke across the beam of Heath’s torch.

  “Oh, that . . . look, you can’t smoke down here. It’s dangerous.”

  “Do you see any ‘No Smoking’ signs around? Anyway I’m sure your mask will protect you.”

  Heath paused and regarded the glowing tip of Gray’s cigarette. He finally came back to the point.

  “Yeah, I’ve read that book. I know it off by heart. It’s a favourite of mine.”

  From further back along the passageways Gray thought he detected a rustling noise, like a pile of leaves dispersed by the wind. But, before he was able to tell from which direction it came, the racket of a passing northbound train drowned them out. Gray thought he heard Heath muttering.

  It sounded like “. . . bigmouth . . . Miguel . . . he’s sorted . . .” but most of these words were also lost in the roar.

  It was obvious that Heath knew something about Drayton’s disappearance and may even have had a hand in it. Perhaps he was also dangerously obsessed with all those ghost stations and had come to regard Drayton as his rival. In any case, the place to interview Heath was back at the Yard, not here and now. Gray’s back and stomach ached; the old ruptures were playing up again. It was time to get back to the surface. There was nothing down here that was of any use to his investigation. Besides, although Heath was small, Gray feared that he was dealing with a lunatic.

  There was that damn rustling again, like leaves! It sounded closer this time. Heath seemed not to notice it though and coldly regarded Gray smoking his cigarette, glaring through narrowed eyes that swam behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

  “Well,” said Gray, “I’ve seen everything I want to see here. Let’s get back to the surface.

  “All right,” Heath replied, “but you ain’t looked yet. To come all this way and not look at it would be a waste of my time and yours.”

  “Look at what exactly?”

  “Over there in the corner. Thirty yards, right up against the wall.” Heath flashed the torch’s beam onto what appeared to be a large pile of rags. “Go and see. I already know what it is. I’ll stay where I am. In case you’re worried, like.”

  As he got nearer, Gray glanced back to make sure that Heath made no attempt to creep up on him. What he believed was a pile of rags was in fact a body slumped in the angle between wall and floor, its face turned towards the tiles. The back of its skull was smashed in. Dried blood caked the matted hair. As he turned the body over, Gray guessed that its face would be unfamiliar; he expected it to be Drayton, whom he’d never seen. But it was the Spaniard, Carlos Miguel. Heath had not moved an inch whilst Gray examined the corpse, but something living dropped from the darkness of the ceiling onto him and the impact drove the police inspector crashing to the floor.

  His head struck the concrete and he blacked out.

  Gray awoke in a tube train carriage. He felt nauseous with pain as consciousness returned. He ran his fingers over his head and found half a dozen scratches and wounds around his face and on the back of his skull. There was a stabbing pain in his stomach and he was aware of feeling wet around the seat of his trousers. The fall had reopened some of his old internal ruptures and blood was leaking out of his lower intestine.

  Although racked with pain, he forced himself to take in the details of his surroundings. He was on a moving train, one that hurtled through the tunnels at breakneck speed.

  The floor was littered with prostrate bodies. Some were hanging by their necks from knotted leather straps attached to the ceiling rails. All had been recently murdered and bore signs of mutilation. There were dozens of the corpses packed into the carriage. Their limbs protruded at misshapen angles from the humps of flesh and clothing. Extreme terror and pain marked their facial expressions. The body of Carlos Miguel lay amongst the charnel crowds. Like the Castilian, Gray had been left for dead.

  Somehow he’d come to
be a passenger in a carriage that appeared to date from, he guessed, the 1920s. The carriage lights were single bulbs housed in Art-Deco glass oysters with a very wide aisle running between the longitudinal seating. It must have been antiquated rolling stock, for there were advertisements from that far-off decade above the windows and the Underground map showed routes such as the Hampstead and Highgate Line, the City and South London Railway and the Central London Railway. Back then the Victoria and Jubilee lines had not even been thought of, let alone built. Moreover, the map was like a complicated tangle of spaghetti and not modelled on the famous Beck circuit-board design.

  Struggling to his feet and clutching the pole at the end of the seats, Gray stood in a daze for a moment, rocking with the motion of the train. His wristwatch showed 1:20 a.m. He’d been out cold for well over eight hours. His left trouser leg stuck to the inside of his thigh, where the stream of blood oozing from his rectum had partially dried. He picked his way through the corpses and found that he was trapped in the last carriage of the train and the connecting door to the penultimate carriage had been welded shut.

  Gray crept back to a seat and peered through the window to the tunnels outside. Suddenly the train entered a platform, without slowing, and he pressed his face to the glass in order to try and make out the station name as it flashed past. The light from the interior of the carriages projected enough illumination for him to see a faded sign reading NORTH END. It also just made visible the stunted, faceless forms that haunted the shadows of passageways further back – forms that shunned the light, but which welcomed the arrival of the Sentinel with malefic glee, chattering deafeningly in the semi-darkness.

  Gray had no doubt that the inner and outer gates were closed right the way across the Underground network, now that the Sentinel had completed its journey. He harboured the notion that these gates served a purpose quite different from the official one and were used to prevent escape along the tracks to the surface. Drayton had described many pieces of the jigsaw in his book The Secret Underground. Gray had not fitted them together until it was too late and would finally solve the mystery in the labyrinthine reaches of an industrial Sheol.

  In his mind’s eye he saw a vision in which the disparate chapters of Drayton’s book merged to form a coherent explanation of what was happening. It was an explanation involving a series of derelict reverse skyscrapers, one of which was beneath North End, whose ultimate depth was probably over a thousand feet; a structure populated by beings who were sometimes bored with the repast foraged by using the smaller tunnels that led to the cemeteries and burial grounds across London. Could it be possible that the feasters had absorbed some of the characteristics of the corpses upon which they preyed, as in cannibalistic folklore?

  He thought of an abandoned train and its driver . . . Como una palomilla . . . of a man called Heath with thick eyeglasses, his face obscured, and who knew as much as Drayton himself . . .

  As he thought about the ghost stations on the Piccadilly Line, the Central Line, the Metropolitan Line and all the others, he guessed that each doubtless had its own Sentinel operating that night as well.

  Suddenly, the lights in all the carriages went out.

  Acting on the signal, as they’d done so many times in the past, they surged up from the edifice’s black abyss of corridors and debris-choked rooms in a ravenous tide.

  As the stunted forms eagerly scrambled across the divide between them and the train, he finally realised that, in order to keep them down there in the dark, to prevent them overrunning London altogether, it was necessary for them to be fed.

  Gray only had time to scream once in the darkness.

  ELIZABETH HAND

  The Saffron Gatherers

  ELIZABETH HAND IS THE multiple-award-winning author of eight novels, including Generation Loss and Mortal Love, and three collections of short fiction, the most recent being Saffron & Brimstone: Strange Stories. She lives on the coast of Maine.

  “ ‘The Saffron Gatherers’ is the last tale in a four-story sequence titled ‘The Lost Domain’,” the author reveals, “which deals with the themes of creative and erotic obsession.

  “All four tales are set in a post-9/11 world resembling our own; in the case of ‘The Saffron Gatherers’, a dark world that is just now being born.”

  HE HAD ALMOST BEEN as much a place to her as a person; the lost domain, the land of heart’s desire. Alone at night she would think of him as others might imagine an empty beach, blue water; for years she had done this, and fallen into sleep.

  She flew to Seattle to attend a symposium on the Future. It was a welcome trip – on the East Coast, where she lived, it had rained without stopping for thirty-four days. A meteorological record, now a tired joke: only six more days to go! Even Seattle was drier than that.

  She was part of a panel discussion on natural disasters and global warming. Her first three novels had presented near-future visions of apocalypse; she had stopped writing them when it became less like fiction and too much like reportage. Since then she had produced a series of time-travel books, wish-fulfilment fantasies about visiting the ancient world. Many of her friends and colleagues in the field had turned to similar themes, retro, nostalgic, historical. Her academic background was in classical archeology; the research was joyous, if exhausting. She hated to fly, the constant round of threats and delay. The weather and concomitant poverty, starvation, drought, flooding, riots – it had all become so bad that it was like an extreme sport now, to visit places that had once unfolded from one’s imagination in the brightly-colored panoramas of 1920s postal cards. Still she went, armed with eyeshade, earplugs, music and pills that put her to sleep. Behind her eyes, she saw Randall’s arm flung above his head, his face half-turned from hers on the pillow. Fifteen minutes after the panel had ended she was in a cab on her way to SeaTac. Several hours later she was in San Francisco.

  He met her at the airport. After the weeks of rain back East and Seattle’s muted sheen, the sunlight felt like something alive, clawing at her eyes. They drove to her hotel, the same place she always stayed; like something from an old B-movie, the lobby with its ornate cast-iron stair-rail, the narrow front desk of polished walnut; clerks who all might have been played by the young Peter Lorre. The elevator with its illuminated dial like a clock that could never settle on the time; an espresso shop tucked into the back entrance, no bigger than a broom closet.

  Randall always had to stoop to enter the elevator. He was very tall, not as thin as he had been when they first met, nearly twenty years earlier. His hair was still so straight and fine that it always felt wet, but the luster had faded from it: it was no longer dark-blonde but grey, a strange dusky color, almost blue in some lights, like pale damp slate. He had grey-blue eyes; a habit of looking up through downturned black lashes that at first had seemed coquettish. She had since learned it was part of a deep reticence, a detachment from the world that sometimes seemed to border on the pathological. You might call him an agoraphobe, if he had stayed indoors.

  But he didn’t. They had grown up in neighboring towns in New York, though they only met years later, in DC. When the time came to choose allegiance to a place, she fled to Maine, with all those other writers and artists seeking a retreat into the past; he chose Northern California. He was a journalist, a staff writer for a glossy magazine that only came out four times a year, each issue costing as much as a bottle of decent sémillon. He interviewed scientists engaged in paradigm-breaking research, Nobel Prize-winning writers; poets who wrote on their own skin and had expensive addictions to drugs that subtly altered their personalities, the tenor of their words, so that each new book or online publication seemed to have been written by another person. Multiple Poets’ Disorder, Randall had tagged this, and the term stuck; he was the sort of writer who coined phrases. He had a curved mouth, beautiful long fingers. Each time he used a pen, she was surprised again to recall that he was left-handed. He collected incunabula – Ars oratoria, Jacobus Publicus’s disquisition on the art
of memory; the Opera Philosophica of Seneca, containing the first written account of an earthquake; Pico della Mirandola’s Hetaplus – as well as manuscripts. His apartment was filled with quarter-sawn oaken barrister’s bookcases, glass fronts bright as mirrors, holding manuscript binders, typescripts, wads of foolscap bound in leather. By the window overlooking the Bay, a beautiful old mapchest of letters written by Neruda, Beckett, Asaré. There were signed broadsheets on the walls, and drawings, most of them inscribed to Randall. He was two years younger than she was. Like her, he had no children. In the years since his divorce, she had never heard him mention his former wife by name

  The hotel room was small and stuffy. There was a wooden ceiling fan that turned slowly, barely stirring the white curtain that covered the single window. It overlooked an airshaft. Directly across was another old building, a window that showed a family sitting at a kitchen table, eating beneath a fluorescent bulb.

  “Come here, Suzanne,” said Randall. “I have something for you.”

  She turned. He was sitting on the bed – a nice bed, good mattress and expensive white linens and duvet – reaching for the leather mailbag he always carried to remove a flat parcel.

  “Here,” he said. “For you.”

  It was a book. With Randall it was always books. Or expensive tea: tiny, neon-colored foil packets that hissed when she opened them and exuded fragrances she could not describe, dried leaves that looked like mouse droppings, or flower petals, or fur; leaves that, once infused, tasted of old leather and made her dream of complicated sex.

  “Thank you,” she said, unfolding the mauve tissue the book was wrapped in. Then, as she saw what it was, “Oh! Thank you!”

  “Since you’re going back to Thera. Something to read on the plane.”