Mind the Gap

Page 3

"Here, girl, what do you think you're up to?" a voice called.
Jazz pressed herself against the wall and moved around onto the ledge. The shriek of the slowing train grated along her spine. The light of its headlamps picked her out on the ledge as it bulleted into the station from behind her, slow-ing, slowing...
Face sliding against filthy tiles, Jazz shuffled swiftly along the ledge, forcing herself not to imagine falling back-ward or being blown off by the wind of the passing train. If she fell beneath it, her mother would never forgive her.
The train hissed as it slowed, the front car coming toward the end of the platform, nearly adjacent to her now. The conductor would see her. Someone would be called. More people would chase her into the darkness, and then where would she hide?
Her left hand suddenly pressed against nothing. She slipped around the end of the wall onto a stretch of for-gotten platform. On the track, the train hissed a final puff as though frustrated by her survival, and then she heard the sounds of disgorging passengers and others climbing aboard. A recorded voice announced the time of the next ex-pected train and advised those getting on and off to mind the gap.
It seemed she had already been forgotten.
Jazz laughed softly and without humor. Mind the gap, indeed. Never knew when you'd find yourself falling into one of the cracks in the world. Here she was, living proof. Alice down the rabbit hole.
The train hissed again, doors closing, and started for-ward. In the light from its headlamp eyes, she stared at the iron grating before her. Beyond it lay another stretch of platform, eight feet deep and perhaps twenty long. A rusted, padlocked chain locked the gate. Some cinema action hero might have been able to snap the rust-eaten chain, but not Jasmine Towne. The train rattled past, gaining speed, and with it her pulse began to race again.
She saw the shapes of people at first, and the occasional blur of a face, but the faster it went the more those people seemed to blur into one.
The illumination from the train's interior flickered off the black iron grate, but at the upper edge of her vision was a rectangle of darkness that seemed to swallow the light. Jazz studied it, blinking at the realization that either a sec-tion of the grate had been broken away or whoever had in-stalled it had left a transom window above.
She gripped the iron bars, propped the rubber sole of one trainer against the metal, then hauled herself up. If Jazz could be said to be gifted at anything, it was climbing. Her mother had often called her a monkey for her love of scam-pering up trees and rocks and the way she could always manage to break into their town house if her mum had lost her keys. She'd thought, once upon a time, of becoming a dancer. But little girls always wanted to be ballerinas or princesses, and people like her weren't allowed dreams for very long.
Her foot slipped, but her hands found a grip on the transom. One knee banged painfully against the gate, rat-tling the chain and sending a shower of rust flaking to the platform. But she pulled herself up across the bottom bar of the transom and through to the other side like a gymnast.
She landed in a crouch and paused for a moment, listen-ing to the roar of the train fading into the distance. Light from the station reflected off the tiles on the other side of the tunnel, giving her just enough illumination to see. Voices came from beyond the wall: bored commuters talk-ing into phones and excited tourists nattering in a mixture of languages.
She stood frozen, like a rabbit caught in oncoming head-fights. And when someone shouted, Jazz bolted. As the train passed, its light had shown her the outline of a tall door, and she guessed it to be an old exit up to street level. The Underground was rife with such things, she'd read, coming up into the storage rooms and basements of chemists, mar-kets, and pubs that had once been Tube stations or buildings associated with them.
Dark shapes scurried and squealed around her feet: rats. As long as they ran away from her, not toward her, she could put up with that.
The door stood open a few inches, the frame corroded. Whatever lock had once sealed it had been broken, leaving a hole where the knob ought to be. Jazz had a strange feeling that the door had been forced closed, not open.
She reached out. The metal felt warm to the touch and pulsed with the thrum of the Underground, like a beating heart. Jazz leaned her weight against it, and it scraped open across the concrete floor.
Blinking, she waited for her eyes to adjust. The stairwell ought to have been pitch black, but a dim blue glow pro-vided light enough to see that she had been wrong. The spi-ral metal staircase did not lead toward the surface. Rather, it led deeper into the ethereal gloom.
She could go back. For a moment she considered it. But to what? The Uncles and her mother's corpse, and the mur-derous woman with Jazz on her mind? No. There would be no going back now. If she returned to the surface, it had to be far from here. If she got onto a train, it could not be at this station.
Somewhere in the underground labyrinth, there would be another way up.
****
The spiral staircase created an echo chamber, and the sound of her breathing surrounded her as Jazz started down. Such evidence of her panic forced her to calm down, to slow her breath, and soon her pulse slowed as well. Still, she heard her heartbeat much too loudly in her head.
It was at least thirty feet until the staircase ended. The blue glow brightened into silvery splashes of light from sev-eral caged bulbs, metal-wrapped cables bolted to the curved stone walls. She wondered who would come down here to replace these bulbs when they blew.
More hesitant now, Jazz stepped away from the bottom of the stairs and along a short tunnel. It emerged into a vast space that made her catch her breath. Above her was a ventilation shaft that led up to a louvered grille. Daylight filtered down, a splash of light in the false underground night. Like distant streetlamps, other vents served the same purpose in the otherwise enduring darkness of that long-abandoned station. The platform had been removed, and beneath her feet there was only dirt and broken concrete. In a far-off puddle of light, a short set of steps led up to where the platform had once been, but now they were stairs to nowhere. Without the platform, she noticed for the first time how round the tunnels were —long cylinders bored through the city's innards.
Peering along the throat of the tunnel, past the farthest splash of light, she saw only darkness. But somewhere down there, where the platform had once ended, there must be another door.
Jazz started in that direction, but as she moved beyond the first pool of light, the dirt and broken ground underfoot disappeared in the dark. She moved to the tracks and crouched to place a hand on the cold metal. Once it had been a working artery, pumping blood to the city's heart. Now it was dead. She stepped over the rail and between the tracks. Simple enough to match her stride to the carefully placed sleepers.
The sound of her movement echoed around her: scrap-ing stones, sharp breath, footsteps.
Walking into the darkness did not make her feel lost. A pool of light waited ahead and another remained behind her. She could see those areas of the tunnel well enough. Yet when she looked down at her feet she saw nothing, and even her arms seemed spectral things.
Water dripped nearby, but she could not locate its source. She studied the walls, searching for any sign of an exit. Without a way out she wouldn't get far, at least not without a torch.
Something rustled off to her left. Jazz froze, listening for it to come again. Seconds passed before she took another step, then she heard the sound again. Not a rustle, but a whisper. A voice in the darkness, speaking gibberish.
"Who is it? Who's there?" she said, flinching at the sound of her own voice.
The whispering went on and, from behind her, back toward that spiral staircase, came another voice, secretive, furtive. The Uncles or their lackeys —those dark-suited BMW men—had followed her.
"Shit," she whispered, and started moving more swiftly.
The whispers followed, but though they certainly must have seen her, no one shouted after her.
"Bloody Churchill," one of them said, but this was no whisper. She heard it clear as a bell. "Thinks he's a general but hasn't the first idea how to fight a war. Get us all killed, he will."
A child laughed.
A burst of static filled the tunnel, followed by music —a tune she knew, something her mother had hummed while making dinner.
Are the stars out tonight?
I don't know if it's cloudy or bright.
I only have eyes for you, dear.
Sometimes Mum sang little snippets of it, and Jazz had al-ways cherished those rare moments when her mother seemed to steal a moment's peace, from the fear that ran through her every day, like deep water under a frozen river. Jazz had asked her several times about the song. All but once, Mum had seemed not to know what she was talking about. That once, she'd relented.
"Was a time your father sang it to me, and meant every word," she said. She never spoke of it again.
Churchill? What was that about? The music crackled, a tinny echo, as though it came from some old-time radio. Someone was down here in the tunnel with her, but it wasn't the Uncles or their other BMW men.
The song continued to play, but the child's laugh did not come again.
Hope and dread warred within her. Whoever lurked in the tunnel could point her way out, if they weren't mad as a hatter. But that business about Churchill pricked at her mind, and the memory of that voice seeped down her spine.
Retreat not an option, she went on, peering into the darkness for a face. The radio crackled again and other whispers joined in. Jazz's breath caught. How many people were down here? She caught a few snatches of words, but nothing that made any sense. What had she discovered, some sort of subterranean enclave?
"Sir?" a voice called. "Paper, sir?"
Before she turned, in that singular moment, she under-stood something that had been niggling at the back of her mind. The laughter, the voices, even the music... they made no echo. The tiles did not throw the sounds back at her.
Her skin prickled as she turned and saw the boy in his cap and jacket, the shape of him more a suggestion in the dark, a fold in the air. He held something out, a newspaper, as if to some passerby. But no one else was there. He did not seem to have noticed Jazz at all.
She backed up, caught her foot on the rail, and sprawled on her ass.
When she sat up, breath hitching, shaking in confusion, the ghost had gone. For what else could it have been? Hal-lucination or phantom: those were really the only choices, and she feared madness more than haunting.
The music and whispering had stopped.
Jazz stood and stepped carefully back between the tracks. With a quick glance at the spot where she'd seen the darkness form its lines and shadows into a shape, she hurried on, wondering if the whole day might be some kind of breakdown, a series of waking nightmares. What if she was sitting in her bedroom right now, or in a hospital, and none of what she had seen was real?
The thought brought the threat of tears, and she bit her lower lip. The rail glistened with weak light that filtered down the vent shaft ahead. The dripping noise remained, and from far above she could hear car horns and the roar of engines. She moved into the pool of daylight, and it made her wonder just how dark it would become down here when night fell.
She glanced around, searching for an exit. Again, as she had back on the station platform, she felt the burden of strangers' eyes upon her. Twisting, she peered back the way she'd come, but there were no signs of anyone there.
Taking a breath, she started into the darkness again, hur-rying toward the next shaft of light.
Focusing only on her footing, she stepped from sleeper to sleeper, catching the glint of the rails just enough to avoid stumbling over them.
The key's in adapting, her mother's voice muttered in her head. Remember, they can't find you if you can't find yourself.
That particular comment had been made while out shopping for a winter coat, the day Mum had bought her the red one with the fur-fringed hood. It hung in her closet now, and would forever, until someone packed it up with the rest of her things and it vanished into another closet or some charity shop.
Jazz swallowed but found that her throat had gone dry. Mum spoke to her from the surface world, from the life that had ended just an hour ago. How much might be memory and how much her own imagination, she did not want to know.
Perhaps she'd become just another ghost in the Underground.
"How'm I doing, Mum? Lost enough?" Jazz said aloud, her voice quavering, the echo soft.
Halfway to the next splash of light, the whispers began again. The Churchill hater spoke up, so close. Too close. Jazz spun around, crouched down, and now the walls she had built to keep out the fear gave way and it crashed in around her, drowning her. Her eyes searched the tunnel for ghosts.
"Where are you? What the hell are you doing here?" she cried into the darkness.
A horn beeped loudly behind her.
Jazz spun and saw the car coming at her along the tracks. On instinct, she threw herself to one side.
But the car existed only as a shade —a pale, translucent image. As it passed, she heard the engine buzz in her ears, but the tunnel did not echo the sound.
A cacophony of sound erupted around her. Voices, Cars. The music started up again, crackling radio static. "Pennies from Heaven" this time. The newsboy hawked papers. And as she spun, eyes wide, body shaking with the influx of the impossible, the tunnel came alive with faded images. Gas lamps burned on street corners, and she saw the city unfold around her. London —but not the London she knew. The clothes were of another era. The Churchill hater stood out-side a pub, blustering drunkenly at another man; couples walked arm in arm, the men in suits and the ladies in dresses.
The ghosts of London.
All she could do to escape was close her eyes, but when she squeezed them shut, an all too earthly image slashed across her mind instead.
No escape.
Jazz screamed, and when she ran out of breath, she in-haled and screamed again. And when she finally opened her eyes, the ghosts were still there. On one corner stood a man in an elegant tuxedo, top hat, and white gloves. He fanned a deck of cards to an unseen audience the way the newsboy had offered his papers to invisible passersby. With his right hand he drew out a single card, and her eyes followed that card for only an instant but long enough for the rest of the deck to vanish. He opened his arms as if to welcome ap-plause, and doves appeared in his hands, spectral wings tak-ing flight. The birds vanished when they reached the roof of the tunnel, passing through as if by some other illusion.