The Night the Lights Went Out

by John Eider

My hand was in agony. A Bull Terrier, my favourite breed as well, the little devil. What was it you could get from a dog bite, tetanus? I didn’t exactly have a telephone to call NHS Direct. I soon remembered my mission though, and found my way back on route. Directions were obviously sketchy – I was looking for an unmarked, purposefully unremarkable structure tucked away in what the map suggested was a park. The Major had made notes upon the map though. Just as it occurred to me that what I was holding was itself a state secret, I had a vision in the gloom: the quiet street I was by that time on, with its tall houses turned into flats, led not onto another one similar (as had the one before that, and the one before that) but instead ended with what, in the barely-moonlit night, seemed a vast and formless shape. Moving closer, even with three-hour-adjusted eyes, I had to get almost up to it to see that it was a bank of high, full-leaved trees, nearly still and held back by high railings.

  I jumped up onto the low wall the railings protruded from, and even up there they were as high as me. I threw my thrice-folded coat over the spikes that topped them, and clambering inelegantly, got myself over. I was making good time, would save myself a day if I got the job done that night. I stood with the railings behind me and giant trees above. Could I just make out a path ahead? A line of woodland something like any of those marked on the map? I walked straight forward into grass already knee-height. I had no worries of being seen out in the open when I wouldn’t have seen another person ten feet away. Yet this space, dotted with the threatening shapes of trees alone or clustered into copses, seemed to stretch out beyond any impression of coming to an end.

  As I walked I was remembering my visits to London, itself not far away now, just the other side of the M25; and how if there was one thing an occasional visitor knew about our capital it was that it was full of parks. It had seemed to me as if you could travel from one side of London to the other with birds singing and fresh air in your lungs, barely feeling the tarmac beneath your feet as you left one acre of green to cross the road and enter another. I tried to remember the ones I had seen at different times: Primrose Hill, Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park to see a rock concert, St James’ Park, Green Park… I’d wondered at the time if they’d run out of notable names by that last one.

  I squinted at the map, but by this time of night I might as well have been looking at sandpaper. I had memorised the Major’s notes though, brief, and meaningless to any other who might read them: ‘At lowest point, in trees, beside path.’ ‘In trees’ didn’t help, and I was sure I could stumble on any number of paths; but I could at least feel the ground beneath my feet as I kept walking, and try to follow its direction as it fell.

  At first I felt no incline, only a slight sixth sense of being higher than the invisible landscape ahead of me; but soon the ground was noticeably dipping… and as I walked my feet found the gravel of a path falling in that same direction. Before I knew it, sure enough the path had led me into a wooded almost-arch of trees. From the glint of bark, I knew these included silver birch; and from the fallen pinecones on the path, fir. And there among them – more shadow than substance – was my objective.

  It didn’t look much, just a small glum structure. A cursory inspection conducted as much with hands as with eyes revealed it to be windowless and featureless, bar a handleless door. Most visitors sitting on the grass beside the trees wouldn’t even have seen it, and even a passing dog walker coming through the trees might have assumed it was nothing more than a pump house or place for the park rangers to lock up their equipment.

  I knew though that this was an iceberg mostly out of view, and that the small square block above ground did nothing to betray the larger part below. I pushed at the door, which was secure; and then moved, having to crawl beneath blackberry bushes at one point – a handy food source in the event of Armageddon – around all sides of the structure to check for damage or decay offering an alternate means of entrance. All was safe and sound though; which meant that while I wouldn’t be dealing with any wildlife (human or otherwise) once I got down to the lower levels, did mean it would be a pig of a job, and noisy, getting in.

  The jimmy in the rim of the door, I pushed… and nothing gave. Again, and with sustained pressure as opposed to one great heave, the concrete around the doorframe began to give with a low crunch. I moved the jimmy around the points of the frame repeatedly, putting all my weight behind it, with the result that after a few minutes the whole door frame, with the door locked within it, could be moved an inch backward and forward within its concrete setting… but without a hope it seemed of getting the door itself open.

  Even as I paused to breathe, I knew to try again was futile – which left me with the one worst option: an exterior explosion to get myself in.

  My equipment wasn’t sophisticated, merely charges and timed fuses. Allowing myself the momentary luxury of torchlight, I fumbled with the small packages in my bag to find one of each. The explosives were of different sizes, and I needed one large enough to make sure the door was blown, but while causing the minimum amount of noise in this night of unearthly silence…

  The sound it did make had to be heard to be believed; indeed I might have imagined that I had been struck deaf by the blast in the sudden silence afterward, but for the panic-squark and flapping wings of birds roosting in the trees around the explosion. The air seemed to thump me with dust even from fifteen yards away, where I had crouched to protect myself from the blast. I looked away initially of course; but even after turning back to assess the damage there were still trees swaying and broken branches falling, in a monstrous collapsing shadow-pattern before my nighttime eyes.

  I stayed stock still as the din subsided and the birds departed, safe that I would not be seen by anything drawn there it being so dark; but I was alone, no animal there to stir, no voice to call. I got up, to stand there in the park like the last man alive.

  I wandered back slowly along the path, it buried now under branches and ripped up brambles. Finding my way back to the structure, I found the metal door and its frame had been blown right out of their hole in the wall. Checking first for other sounds among those of the still settling branches, I flicked on the torch and went in.

  Although the wall around the doorframe had held, a part of the roof had fallen, taking the staircase below with it. There had always been the possibility of doing so much damage getting in that I could get no further; yet pointing my torch down I could see among the debris what looked a relatively clear patch of floor below. This was only eight or ten feet down, and so climb-outable of using the two or three steps remaining at ground-level. There might even have been old furniture down there to help me climb back out – I had no excuse not to get in there. Remembering where I thought that small clearing had been, for my torch was now safely in my pocket and I needed both hands for climbing, I lowered myself from the last remaining step – and dropped.

  In those moments I felt many things: fear of falling, fear of landing, anger at the extra treachery of this descent. Underpinning all of these was the knowledge that to turn my ankle down there, for my old leg injury to relapse, for me to catch my head on some unseen object, was death; and death with no more remembrance or memorial than that offered to the countless others who’d died alone those recent times. I fell as if passing through a membrane, a space in time, the very act of being in freefall bringing its own electric shock. Landing was another, different shock: a relief at feeling no pain or sharp objects, and a gulping for breath, while asking myself how I’d ever ended up with this bloody job?

  On landing in a heap on my backside, there was a panic to steady myself and a rush to re-find the torch. Fumbling with it, I finally shone the weak beam around the featureless cell I had arrived in. The air was damp and thick with plaster dust and mould, making it hard to breathe and sticking to my already filthy clothes.

  The first thing the torch picked out through the gloom was rubble. Everywhere rubble: the stairs had been concrete, the whole bunker was concrete, concrete left underground
for decades… Another rockfall might trap me down there yet. I scanned the ceilings; which thankfully in the torchlight looked solid enough. Bringing the beam down to my level though, it found a part-collapsed partition wall – I’d need to be wary.

  Checking where I was treading, I moved through each room, looking at doors hanging off hinges and through holes in fallen walls, not sure how much of this had been done by the blast or had been like it for years. I turned sharply in one doorway and felt my bad leg. This was a new twinge, nowhere near as bad as during my recovery; but there to be felt, and for the first time since Calais. My leg had been fine all mission, even surprisingly so, and so must have been jolted in dropping to the unseen floor. I didn’t want to think about how much worse it might feel after an hour’s rest or an hour’s marching. I got on with my task.

  As I flashed the torch into each new space I saw the same junk as in other bunkers: old chairs; maps on walls; empty filing cabinets; Christ, a mattressless bunk bed; a sign in six inch-high bold letters – ‘FACILITIES ONLY TO BE USED DURING AN ALARM. AT ALL OTHER TIMES USE THOSE ABOVE GROUND’; a fire extinguisher rusted all around its base; a wooden desk, like those my teachers had in school – this would get me back up through the rabbit-hole.

  I had to move it first though. Too heavy to lift, it would need to be pushed; yet every movement of its wooden legs across the rough floor brought down a fresh shower of dust from the ceiling. I was at my furthest point away from the entrance now, and even if I survived a roof-fall, didn’t fancy my chances of making it that far back through collapsed material. I was just looking to see if any of the chairs looked strong enough, when I saw a door.

  It was of similar design to the one just blown out above ground, but for the addition of a handle by the lock; and was set into a wall more substantial than the rotten plasterboard partitions found elsewhere. Scanning the area with the torch, I took down an ancient bunch of keys hung from a bolt on the wall beside it, and tried each in the lock. One seemed to settle there, so I turned the old brown door handle.

  The door opened with a crack and another fall of dust. Wanting only to shove that table under the entrance hole and get out of there, I gulped, and instead entered the opened room.

  In it was another desk like the first, only this one with a heap of moulded files on it, an ashtray and a telephone. This might have been a cosy office once. I wondered if the Russians knew of all our such stations, and we of theirs? And what it might have been like living down here in the Sixties had the bomb been dropped and the wheat growing thin?

  And then another thought occurred, one barely credible. Nah, I thought, but walked closer to the desk anyway. The phone was of the old square style, but where the circular dial should have been was a note in browned paper held within a brass bracket. Whatever had been written in that neat script was no longer legible, at least not in torch light, and so my attention moved to three yellowed clear-plastic buttons above the bracket and just below the chunky handset. I reached for and lifted the receiver, the cradle chiming as the spring was released. For a second that was that, the earpiece dead as I lifted it to my ear. And then the leftmost of the three plastic lights glowed fierce crimson, and a dial tone crackled into life.

  ‘Please hold the line. Connecting you now,’ spoke the voice of someone I fancifully imagined looking like a telephone exchange lady you saw in old films.

  ‘This is London Station,’ said a second voice then, one of a sort I had not heard since leaving the Major on the Northern Coast: military, prim. ‘Please identify yourself.’

  The phone still worked! I had had no training for such a scenario. Though I was in the bunker in a secret capacity, I thought I still ought to try and act responsibly… yet I had no idea what to say. It was no good. Calmly I put the receiver down in its cradle. Immediately the crimson light flashed again, and the phone began a rasping, rusted ringing that didn’t quit for as long as I would be down there. On the table, I got out my bag and repeated the ritual of matching timers and charges, leaving the largest of the latter primed and placed beside the ringing telephone.

  As I left the office, I wasn’t sure whether to close the door so as to concentrate the blast in the most sensitive room; but judging that the charge I’d chosen was large enough to do justice for the whole bunker, left the inner entrance wide open.

  Walking back through the rooms and past the empty desk, I remembered I still hadn’t selected a chair. Panicking afresh, for the timer was now ticking, I looked quickly, and found three down there, each of rusted metal and rotten wood. I threw the third of these aside in frustration, it breaking as I did so. I looked back to the table, like an old and hated comrade, knowing now that moving it was unavoidable. Going as slowly as I could with it across the uneven littered floor, each juddering inch bringing down more dust and setting objects in other rooms clattering in resonant sympathy, I finally, endlessly, got it below the opening. There, I scrambled up onto it; and finding the remaining top steps with my fingers in the dark (and with a level of pain in my wrist that at another time could have had me pass out), I was soon hauled up and among the ruined trees again.

  The small wood was still no place to rest and consider my work done. Yet, unwilling to run on the twitching leg, I merely jogged as far away as I hoped safe, the phone’s ringing still audible even at that distance; and laying down invisible in the long damp grass, allowed myself to breathe the cold night air.

  Chapter 16 – A Day in an Empty House