Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  The following morning, Beth told Sharon that there was a ghost lady living in the walls of her uncle’s house and that she must be sad, because she cried at night when Beth was in bed. Sharon asked her if she was pretending, and Beth swore on the life of her hamster that she wasn’t. She asked her daughter if she had told her uncle about the ghost lady in the walls, and Beth said no, because she could only hear her through a crack in the floor beneath her bed and she didn’t think her Uncle Alastair would believe her.

  When he got home from work that night, Sharon told her husband, who laughed. Beth had an active imagination, sometimes annoyingly so, and Nick believed this was nothing more than one of her stories. Sharon told him he was probably right, but couldn’t quite put it out of her mind; the image of a woman trapped inside the walls of her brother’s small standalone house was such a horrible one. Two days later she had lunch with Alastair and told him what her daughter had said. They laughed about it, and agreed that Beth should be a writer when she grew up. Sharon didn’t give the ghost lady another thought until the following Sunday, when she went to collect Alastair for their monthly visit to the nursing home where their mother lived, and found his house empty.

  After twenty-four hours, during which a series of increasingly anxious calls to her brother’s phone went unanswered, and his neighbors, with whom he had been friendly, confirmed that he hadn’t mentioned any upcoming trips away, Sharon rang the police, who broke down the door of the small house he had lived in for almost twenty years. Inside, they found a hidden door standing open in the hallway, a door leading down to a basement that neither Sharon nor Nick had known existed. The small underground space was painted black, lined with cameras and recording equipment, and home to several racks of medical implements and power tools. In the center of the room, hanging from an intricate arrangement of harnesses and pulleys, they found a young woman.

  She was long dead, and he was long gone.

  Within six hours, Alastair Dempsey was the most wanted man in the country. His photo was plastered across every evening newspaper and television bulletin, and the following morning the tabloids exploded with an avalanche of outrage and fury, demanding that he be caught, warning the public over and over that there was a monster out there, searching for his next victim.

  Six days after the hidden basement and its contents were discovered, Dempsey was caught at Dover, trying to board a ferry to France. He ran when he saw the armed police, but cornered against a freight container, with guns pointing at his chest, he gave up and went quietly.

  His trial the following year was a media circus. Twice he was attacked in the dock, leading the judge to take the extraordinary step of banning the public from his courtroom. Alastair Dempsey was charged with a single murder, that of the woman found in his basement, eventually identified as a prostitute named Anna Bailey, but was investigated in connection with more than thirty-five other missing persons, all women, all of whom had disappeared in the fifteen years prior to his arrest. And although none were conclusively linked to him, the senior investigating officer on the case made it clear, in a number of classified memos, that he believed Dempsey had been involved in as many as twenty of them.

  The man himself spoke only twice during the trial, to confirm his name and address. He refused to answer any questions by either the prosecuting or defending attorneys, and showed no emotion whatsoever when he was committed to a secure psychiatric unit for the rest of his life, a sentence that provoked the famous “Throw Away the Key!” headline that filled the Globe’s front page the following morning, and which had now been cut short by supernatural intervention.

  * * *

  The three operators sat in the back of the van, watching evening arrive in the capital via the cameras that were hidden in all four sides of the vehicle’s bodywork.

  In front of them stood the glass and concrete of King’s College London. Through the van’s external microphones Jamie could hear the laughter and chatter of students leaving the building and making their way along the Strand, and the steady thud of music from the student union at the bottom of Surrey Street.

  “I can’t stay here, sir,” said their driver, over the intercom. “Not for more than a couple more minutes.”

  “No problem,” said Jamie. “Just waiting for a clear moment to deploy.”

  He sympathized with the driver; the large black vehicle was far too conspicuous to park on a busy central London street. As soon as his passengers disembarked, he would take the van to a less busy part of the city and wait for the order to return and pick them up. The problem facing Jamie was that he and his squad mates were also highly visible, and he had no desire for them to be on the street for a second longer than was necessary. He checked the screens again, waiting for the foot traffic to die down, for a gap in which they could approach their destination.

  Aldwych Station, which still bore its original name, Strand Station, had been part of a branch of the Piccadilly line that had closed in 1994. The station itself was now listed on the historic register, and the tunnels and platforms that lay intact beneath it were regularly used as locations for films and television programs. It had been the subject of several reinvention and reinvigoration schemes, none of which had made it through the labyrinthine mess of bureaucratic red tape that stymied so many of the capital’s projects. “Surveillance is sure he’s in there?” asked Ellison.

  “So they say,” said Jamie.

  “How do they know?” she asked. “I get that our satellites can track vampires by their heat signature, but almost three hundred escaped from Broadmoor in about half an hour. There can’t be that many satellites up there.”

  “There aren’t,” said Jamie. “Surveillance logged every escapee, but there’s no way they can track them all. They’ll be following as many as they can, at least one from each squad’s target list, and checking back in with the rest, cross-referencing them with hits from CCTV cameras around the country. When a squad destroys a tracked target, Surveillance will search for another one from their list and do a search based on last sightings, or on the direction they were headed last time they were logged. As soon as they find them, they’ll start tracking them.”

  “So they tracked Dempsey all the way here from Broadmoor?” asked Ellison.

  Jamie shook his head. “They tracked Eric Bingham all the way to Peterborough,” he said. “When we destroyed him, they tried to identify another one of the vamps on our list. Alastair Dempsey showed up on CCTV about a mile away from here last night, but we were locked down, so they tracked him here. They lost him when he went underground, but the plans show a closed system of tunnels, making this the only way in or out. They’d have seen him if he came back up.”

  “There’s no such thing as a closed system,” said Morton. “There’ll be escape hatches, and air vents, and emergency staircases. He could be anywhere by now.”

  Jamie gave his squad mate a long look. “You may be right, Operator,” he said. “But Surveillance has got this area covered for ten miles in every direction, and there’s only a mile of tunnel down there. So—”

  “Those tunnels lead into other tunnels,” interrupted Morton. “And those lead into others, and so on and so on. He could be anywhere in London by now and you know it.”

  “If you think going down there is pointless,” said Jamie, his voice steady, “you’re more than welcome to stay in the van.”

  The rookie stared at him, then shook his head slowly.

  Morton had been cleared for operations by the Science Division psychiatrist little more than an hour before the squad headed out. The assessment that had arrived on Jamie’s console had been frustratingly brief and apparently more interested in the need for able bodies to take part in operations than the mental state of its subject. He had requested more detail and eventually received a radio call from the psychiatrist, who insisted that the rookie was fine. Morton was apparently a deep thinker with an unusually
well-developed conscience, attributes, the psychiatrist suggested in a maddeningly patronizing tone, that Jamie should perhaps be looking to harness rather than complain about.

  The man himself had been sullen ever since arriving in the hangar, and had said very little during the journey from the Loop to London. He had not been rude or genuinely insubordinate; he had answered questions, although his answers had largely been limited to single words, and he had given the appearance of listening to the briefing update. Jamie believed his pride had been dealt a blow by the psych evaluation, which could end up being a good thing; if it made him determined to prove Jamie wrong, it could work to the squad’s advantage. But as he looked at Morton, sitting stiffly in his seat in the back of the van, he was far from sure.

  “We work with the information we have,” he said, forcing as much calm into his voice as he possibly could. “And Surveillance says he’s down there. So until we’ve checked every inch of those tunnels and found nothing, we’re going to assume they’re right. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Morton.

  “Good,” said Jamie. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ellison?”

  The third member of Operational Squad M-3, who had been watching the conversation between Morton and Jamie with gathering unease on her face, nodded. “I’m ready, sir. What’s the plan?”

  “Right through the front door,” said Jamie. He had turned his attention back to the monitors and seen what he was looking for: a moment in which the pavement outside their vehicle had fallen quiet. “Move out.”

  He threw open the van’s back door. Cool air rushed in as Morton leaped out onto the temporarily empty pavement. Ellison went after him, a flicker of a smile on her face as she did so. Jamie followed them, slamming the door shut behind him, and strode quickly across to the pale stone facade of the station, where his squad mates were waiting for him.

  The two padlocks hanging from the security grill covering the station’s red metal doors were intact and covered with a thin layer of dust; it was clear that no one had entered the station by conventional means in at least a number of weeks. Jamie glanced upward and instantly saw what he had been expecting: a broken window on the third floor.

  That’s how he went in. So he was here, even if Morton is right and he’s gone.

  Ellison pulled a small cylinder from her pocket and sprayed liquid nitrogen over the padlock. There was a crackling sound, like milk hitting breakfast cereal, before she reversed the cylinder and brought its pointed end down on the center of the lock. The metal shattered, tumbling to the pavement in a hundred jagged pieces. Morton reached between the bars, unwound the chain, and pushed one of the doors open.

  * * *

  The ticket hall had once been grand, and some of that grandeur still remained in the green-and-cream tiling, the carved wood around the ticket windows, the high ceilings and arched openings. But dust now covered everything, and evidence of the functional use of the building was everywhere: piles of cables, extension cords, yellowed printouts of script pages and call sheets.

  Jamie called for flashlights and ordered Morton to lead them through the empty ticket barriers and toward the long-stationary escalators that would take them underground. A single elevator remained in working order, for transporting equipment and lazy actors and directors down to the platforms, but it was sealed shut. Jamie would not have used it in any case; he wanted to be able to see his surroundings at all times.

  Jamie followed Morton, with Ellison close behind, her MP5 in her hands. He had not drawn a weapon, but his fingers were resting within easy reach of the grip of his T-Bone. They rounded a sharp corner, the beams from their flashlights sweeping from side to side, illuminating the green tiles of the old station walls. Then Morton raised a single clenched fist, ordering them to stop.

  “What is it?” asked Jamie, his voice low.

  “Door,” replied Morton. “Broken open.”

  Jamie stepped forward, pointing for Ellison to stay where she was. The corridor widened to accommodate the three escalators that filled it, and white wooden doors were set into the walls on both sides. One of these was hanging open, its lock shattered and dangling by a few narrow splinters.

  “Check it,” said Jamie.

  Morton nodded, drew his T-Bone, and crept silently forward. He reached the door and pulled it toward him with the barrel of his weapon. It creaked once, then swung on its one remaining hinge, revealing a storeroom full of empty metal cages. Jamie stepped up to the doorway, his T-Bone against his shoulder, as Morton entered the storeroom, twisting and crouching to shine his flashlight up at the ceiling and the high corners of the room.

  “Door,” he whispered.

  Jamie nodded and stepped through the doorway. At the end of the storeroom was a second door, also open. Footprints had been left in the thick dust in front of it, footprints that led toward where he was now standing. Morton edged forward and craned his neck through the door.

  “Spiral staircase,” he said. “Heading upward. It must come out on one of the floors above the station.”

  Jamie nodded. “This is how he came in,” he said. “Through the window, down the stairs, and—”

  “What window?” asked Ellison, from out in the corridor.

  “There’s a broken window on the third floor,” said Jamie. “I saw it as we came in.”

  “Thanks for telling us,” said Morton.

  “Sorry,” said Jamie. “I thought you might have noticed it yourselves.”

  He shone his flashlight across the floor, following the footprints. They ended at the broken door, but that was far enough; they all knew where Alastair Dempsey had gone.

  “The escalators are sixty-five feet,” said Jamie, walking back out into the corridor. “There are two platforms, one on each side. If there’s no sign of him, we’ll check the east platform first. The tunnel was closed in 1917, and it’s sealed at both ends.”

  “What about the west tunnel?” asked Morton.

  “It was closed in 1994,” said Jamie. “The tracks are still there, and the tunnel is clear. It runs north for about half a mile.”

  “Half a mile?” repeated Morton. “Don’t you think there might be one or two places to hide in half a mile of tunnel?”

  “We’d better get on with it then,” said Ellison, glaring at her squad mate.

  Jamie shot her a quick smile. “Agreed,” he said. “Morton, you stay on point.”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied, and started down the middle escalator, his boots thudding on the metal stairs. The beam of Morton’s flashlight rested steadily on the distant floor. Ellison’s and Jamie’s swept slowly in wide arcs as they followed him down toward it.

  At the bottom, Jamie immediately saw that there was no need to check the east platform. A thick layer of dust and dirt covered the floor tiles, in which Dempsey’s footprints were clearly visible. Spaced widely and evenly apart, they disappeared through the arch that led to the west platform. It was darker at the bottom of the escalators. The lights in the station still worked, but Jamie had not asked for them to be turned on. He did not want to make it obvious to Alastair Dempsey that someone was coming.

  The three operators stepped silently through the arch and emerged onto a perfectly preserved platform. The tiling on the walls and ceilings was immaculate, and a tube train sat silently on the tracks before them, its doors open, its seats empty.

  “What the hell?” asked Morton, his voice low.

  “It must be used for filming,” said Ellison.

  “It’s creepy.”

  “Tell me about it,” Ellison said, and smiled at her squad mate.

  The footprints headed north, then disappeared at the end of the platform. Jamie led his squad in the same direction, their T-Bones drawn, their flashlights casting bright white light before them. It was hot on the platform, and humid; the air was
warm and musty and seemed thick, almost solid. It smelled faintly rotten, and Jamie felt his nose wrinkle in mild disgust as he reached the end of the platform. He lowered his visor, twisted the dial on his belt to thermographic, and looked down the tunnel. It appeared as a flat tube of dark red, with no detail whatsoever.

  The humidity’s blowing out the sensors, he thought, pushing the visor back up. Awesome. No thermographics, no satellite overlook, no console signal. Welcome back to the dark ages.

  A concrete walkway extended about six feet until four wide steps led down to the tunnel floor. The train loomed over them, incredibly tall when viewed from the same level as its wheels. It seemed oddly threatening, as though it was merely sleeping. Jamie imagined its engines suddenly roaring into life, the flat metal front lurching after them in the darkness as they fled along its rails, and shivered. He turned his back on the train, felt his shoulders tense slightly, and shone his flashlight down the dark abyss of the tunnel.

  The tracks gleamed in the light. Between and beyond the silver rails, the tunnel floor was dust and dirt. Toppled piles of crumbling bricks stood against the walls, and plastic bags full of goodness knows what were piled in shiny, sweating mountains. Rats scurried away from the beams, their feet clicking across the floor, their tails leaving trails in the dust and soot.

  “This way,” said Jamie, his voice sounding far less confident than he would have liked. He was suddenly very conscious of where they were, who they were looking for, and how far away help would be if something went wrong in this old, forgotten place.

  “Let’s do it,” said Ellison.