by Chris Ward
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One hour later, with the sun’s heat lost behind the crumbling high-rises to the west, Rob had made the hole large enough to climb through. He’d found some of the masonry rather tough to shift, and his back was damp with sweat. His hands were calloused, his throat dry. He longed for a drink, even a swig of the old man’s espresso.
He piled the loose bricks by the hole, climbed inside and then partly bricked it up again, enough to conceal the entrance. He didn’t want anyone else to find it; dead ends were a bad place to be caught at night.
Steps led into the darkness. The lingering daylight guided him halfway down. After that he felt his way. While his decision to break into the derelict station hadn’t been on a whim like most things in his life, Rob had come unprepared. He had no torch, no matches. All he had was faith, and that wasn’t much to go on.
At the bottom of the stairs, a corridor rolled away into darkness. The air was dank and muggy around him. Drops of condensation splashed his face. Rob put his arms out in front of him and walked blindly forward into the darkness, trusting his luck that nothing would have fallen to block his way. He could feel a draft coming from somewhere ahead; he wasn’t likely to meet any more walls he couldn’t skirt around.
He reached a section where the passage turned left; he knew because a glow had appeared in the darkness ahead, the luminescence of emergency strip lighting that really should have gone out long ago.
Yet they were still there, glowing away potently, lighting the way down a long, tiled corridor, five metres wide, dusty, but still intact. About halfway along, a row of metal contraptions blocked the way, and he paused to examine them before climbing over and continuing.
They were old ticket gates, still waiting around for the commuters to return.
At the end of the wide corridor Rob found himself at the top of a pair of what he would describe as electric stairways. He stepped on to the one indicated for down. He didn’t expect it to move, but surprisingly it did, rumbling into life as his body tripped a motion sensor. Clouds of dust bloomed up into the air, cogs whined and squealed, and rusted joints grated as the waking metallic dinosaur carried him down into the earth.
He was close, he knew it. To whatever it was he needed to see, whatever it was that was rushing through the dark. He hadn’t told the old man why he had been breaking into the bricked up tube station, but the old man hadn’t been far wrong. The truth was that Rob had nothing in his life worth holding on to. His family were all dead, his only friends would kill him for a pound, and he slept in burnt out buildings at night. People beat him, and he beat up other people for money to buy food and clothes. On another day he might have hit the old man with the stick, pushed his body into the hole he’d made, and bricked it back up.
Rob wasn’t a bad person. He just lived in a bad, bad world, and there wasn’t room to be good outside of the monorail gates and the walls around central London. The world these days wasn’t kind to people like him, whose shoes weren’t new enough to be let in. You made your own laws and your own luck, or you ended up like his father, beaten to death outside the employment office when Rob was still in primary school, or like his sister, caught on the way home from school by a gang and abused so many times that the idiots that passed for police hadn’t known if her attackers had numbered five or ten.
This legend, this myth, that in the London Underground trains still ran, was something to hold on to, something to clutch while he tried to sleep at night, wrapped up in a couple of dirty blankets in some derelict building, hoping no one would find him, hoping he wouldn’t need to use the broken bottle that lay by his makeshift bed. It was a dream, and in a world where dreams didn’t exist anymore the idea of ancient trains rumbling beneath the city long after the last station had been boarded over or bricked up was more like magic than reality.
He stepped off the moving stairway, into another corridor with strip lighting down its centre. It was brighter here, no longer emergency lighting, but regular, working hour light. The floor, as best it could be was clean, spotted with gum and stained but polished nevertheless, as though someone had come through recently with a mop. Rob felt more certain than ever that a revelation was just moments away.
The strip lighting ended at an archway. Rob’s heart was racing as he stepped through it and out on to the platform. Wall lights gave it a yellow glow, illuminating a large sign saying ‘Northbound’, and various posters along the opposite wall, advertising movies, perfumes, shoes, clothes, hotels, none of which Rob had ever heard of. In the light they looked new; they could have been posted yesterday.
Rob looked down over the platform’s edge. The rails gleamed. They seemed to vibrate in anticipation.
He looked up and down the platform. Unsurprisingly, there were no other people waiting. An overhead sign a few metres away suddenly flashed up the words TRAIN APPROACHING in red letters. An electronic gong sounded. Rob stepped back, afraid; after all, the station was supposed to be derelict. He looked up again at the sign. The Bound for: section was blank.
A roaring, which had begun as a low hum back in the dark tunnel to his left was getting louder. He felt warm air on his face. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them again twin eyes of yellow light watched him out of the darkness. As he stared them down, the sound grew louder, the metal face of a train appeared, and then suddenly it was upon him, roaring into the station.
Rob wasn’t surprised when it slowed down and came to a stop in front of him. He looked up through the windows at the rows of empty seats inside. This was his ride, his chance. It had come here and stopped for him, he knew. It had come to take him away.
The doors swung open. Rob took one look up and down the empty platform, then up at the empty carriage. History blew out at him, the breath of a million commuters long dead. He closed his eyes, and with a smile he stepped on board.
The doors slid closed behind him.