‘This is Sloe,’ said the woman he had travelled here with, whose name was now lost to him. He hunted for it, confused, while nodding at the people he was being introduced to. ‘And this is her boyfriend, Reef. He’s blind, deaf and mute. He’s also got a serious bowel problem, so excuse his interruptions, okay? They’re sentinels. We’ve got thousands of them. Most of them fucked, physically. Chances are you see a tramp sitting outside a bank, or in a subway, well they’re sentinels too. Keeping watch. Keeping our people safe and sound.’
Monck pressed his hand against the dog’s flanks; the animal responded with a grunt, rolling over to expose his belly. ‘What’s up with her?’ he asked.
‘Someone broke her neck. That’s why we’re here. You’re going to help me get her over to the Face. Where the nurses can help her.’
‘Why isn’t she in hospital?’ Monck asked, clearing a space among the debris and sitting down.
The two women swivelled their eyes towards him. Even Reef shifted his head. ‘What is with you, Monck? Have you forgotten yourself? We tend to our own. The doctors are too dangerous for us.’ She held his gaze for a few seconds, and it felt to Monck that she was perhaps trying to read something in his eyes, but then she dismissed him with a flap of her hand.
Sloe was in a bad way. There was an empty phial of dextromoramide and some syringes scattered around the floor. Her vest was damp with sweat. A tear in the cloth disclosed a scar, an arborescent pattern, on her chest, as if a fern had been pressed into her skin. The skin he could see twitching with the beat of her heart. Even in this extreme state of incapacity, he could see she was lovely.
‘We wait till it’s dark,’ his companion said. ‘We can’t risk anyone seeing us on the way to the tunnels. I’ll fetch us a stretcher.’
When Monck moved to follow, she raised a finger. ‘I’ll not be away long.’
Monck folded himself into a corner. Not wanting to enter into any dialogue with Sloe, he patted the dog and tried to make sense of the notes on the wall. There were pictures of tunnels. Sketches. Schematics. Calendars. A photograph of a woman, naked, her ruined body cabled together with thick sutures. A map of their Underground, and the way it secretly fed and interlinked with the tunnels used by the Topsiders. Documents in an illegible hand were signed and stamped with a red mark: an arrow pointing down with an eye on the top. All of this was both distressingly familiar and alien to him.
‘Monck,’ she gurgled. ‘You. Are in. Such danger.’ Here she closed her eyes and swallowed, gritting down on the pain now paling her cheeks. ‘Mistral is going. To kill you.’
‘Mistral,’ Monck said.
‘Your friend. She will. Do For. You. She has already tried. I was. Sent to help her.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asked her.
‘Because I’m tired of the… separation.’ She frowned as she swallowed. Monck was getting impatient but he bit down on his demands that she continue. Clearly she was struggling to speak and probably wasn’t meant to be talking at all.
‘I want to see us pulled inside out. I want it all to collapse. Mistral. She’s trying to draw you in, trying to get you to trust her. She’s going to take you to Blore. She’s. Protecting him. From. You.’ She frowned and coughed, her head jouncing alarmingly on its supportive hammock. She spat twice; the second packet of phlegm contained a bloody core. ‘Christ,’ she muttered. ‘Go now,’ she said. ‘Get Under. She’ll be back soon.’
‘What about you? We need to get you to the nurses.’
‘I’m dead anyway – ’
Reef severed her words with a spray of wild laughter. Before he left the tent, Monck snatched the wad of notes from the wall, stuffing them into his pockets. He fled just as he heard Mistral’s boots gritting across the demolition site, a scrape of metal as she dragged the stretcher behind her.
He feared dropping into the Tube again, knowing he was being fed to a trap, so on Horseferry Road, Monck followed his nose to another redevelopment site, and passed through into the warren of tunnels beneath where the old bomb-resistant rotundas had existed, housing government officials during the war.
He closed his eyes and took off, allowing the dark to flood into him, to coat his senses with its rich mystery. He ploughed through service shafts, broad, dead tunnels, refuse chutes and ventilation ducts. All of them as intuitively known as the vessels and fibres shot through his own body. He stopped when he heard the sound of industry. And opened his eyes.
In the immense chamber ahead, voices clamoured around the noises of hardware, like lost birds. Lit by hundreds of candles, the walls seemed to pulse and shiver, wetted by the coolant jetted into the teeth of the drills as they ground a path through the clay, earth and rock. Monck watched the labour with fascination, as though for the first time. He was not alone; the work space was crowded with children, their faces pressed between the crooked wooden slats and iron webs that formed a fence around it. He saw a slick routine in progress, at odds with the archaic tools and harsh language. As far as he could discern, the workers were divided into a number of groups. Those at the Face, the ‘chisellers’ as they were called, hacked at the jagged wall of rock with edges and staves, cold chisels and pickaxes, sledgehammers; oil-lamps and candles cast frenzied shadows across the uneven walls and ceiling. Behind them, the nurses swept to and fro, offering the chisellers tit milk, if they were lactators, or if not, sugared water. Maintenance teams tended to minor wounds or ensured the tools were kept sharp and functional: a white-blue tongue rasped in a dark corner as a man in a protective mask welded a new handle to a hammer head. Transporters darted between the drones who packed the rubble into oilskin parcels and dragged it into the tunnels to be dispersed. It was tiring to watch, but invigorating too. All of the workers were white-skinned, thin but wiry. None of them looked to have seen the sun for years. Their expression weren’t worth the name: they all looked screened off, closed down, absent.
Monck forgot why he was here, until he heard the echo of boots spiral around the walls behind him, the schrang of steel as Mistral’s weapon tripped across rock. She had sniffed him out. She was good. She was very good. Quickly, he stepped on to the wooden planks that formed a pathway through the mud to the Face. Picking up a tool, he pushed in between two flushed, sweating chisellers, Coffey and Rathlin. They grumbled hellos and a third, Mitre, slapped him on the back and said: ‘Goodstuff having you back in the fold, Monck. You’ve some muscle to apply, though, if you want to catch us up.’
‘Think of it, Monck,’ urged Coffey, leaning into him, his cracked lenses on fire with the reflection of greasy flames. ‘A matter of feet and we shall be finished. The Doorway opened.’
Monck kept quiet, not sure he fully understood what Coffey was telling him. He went back to his work, hacking at a great split in the rock with new vigour. Coffey shrugged, frowning, and followed suit. Mitre took him to one side.
‘Are you well in that secret place of yours?’ he asked, gesturing towards Monck’s head. Mitre’s face was barely recognisable under a thick mask of grime; his eyes shone from it like pearls pressed into dung. ‘Only… you smell of Fresh to me.’
Over his shoulder, Monck saw Mistral move into the workplace. From her hand hung a steel rope that split into four long wires, each tipped with a flashing, spinning razor. ‘Listen,’ Monck said. ‘I’ve been chosen… Odessa selected me for a task. She wants me to hunt down Blore. The man who threatens all this. Who might stop you from what you’re trying to do. She wants me to drop him before he exposes us to Topside.’
‘And you are the best man for this task?’ Mitre looked him up and down as if sceptical. ‘What marks you out as different from the rest of us?’
‘I… I don’t know.’
‘It’s because he’s a Topsider too,’ snapped a woman, one of the nurses, as she passed by with a part for the lathe. Monck stepped back, and felt the cold, rough rock face press against him.
‘Quiet, will you,’ he begged her. ‘I’m in danger.’
Mitre roun
ded on the nurse. ‘Let him speak, Amhurst.’
A small group had formed around Monck now, and though it meant his concealment was improved, he was aware too that Mistral might be drawn.
‘I can’t say what I am.’ He struggled to speak sense of his position. ‘I don’t remember. I don’t think I’ve been Topside. I don’t know. Please… I’m trying to help. I’m in danger…’
A chisel hit the ground beside him, sparks flared. Monck saw Mistral look his way.
‘You’ll be in danger, Freshman, if you don’t speak up,’ Amhurst yelled.
‘Odessa,’ he pleaded, as if the name alone should pacify everyone. Mistral was closing in, his hand lazily turning the steel rope. He could hear the gentle whickering of the steel blades as they cut the air. Her face was a torment of confusion, as if she too was struggling to understand what motivated her. ‘Odessa has sanctioned this work,’ he said quickly. ‘I have to track down the Pusher. I have to find Blore. This is beneficial for all of us. Don’t you see that?’
‘Blore is a Topsider too,’ called a Drone, his empty oilskin sac slung across his shoulder like a deflated body. ‘You’re in cahoots!’
Mistral was pressed up against the rear of the pack but she could not yet see Monck, who had shrunk into the shadows provided by his interrogators. He was considering trying to start a brawl that might give him some space to make an escape when a cry clattered around the cavern like a panicked bird.
‘We’re through!’ it said. ‘We’re through! We’re through!’
All heads snapped up and whipped left as the gravity of the message sank in. An isolated cheer bleated from the pocket of chisellers who had breached the Face, herding momentum until the cave was filled with a returning tide of applause and whistles. Forgotten, Monck went with the surge of the crowd as they piled towards the fissure; he melted away into the dark, keeping his eyes fast upon Mistral, who was running alongside the revellers, ducking and leaping as she tried to pick Monck out.
I have you now, Monck thought. He waited until Mistral appeared satisfied Monck was not among those now working frantically on the break in the Face. He watched Mistral move back into the tunnel. When it felt right to do so, Monck moved after her. Soon, his tunnel senses were singing again, his eyes sucking in every molecule of light and swapping it for detail. He was fleet enough, and wily enough, to track her without making a sound, his feet gliding across the disused tracks of adjoining tunnels, navigating the rockfalls and drifts of litter, sprightly as a goat. The sensation of familiarity welled in him to the extent that he was able to close his eyes and feel his way after his quarry, confident that Mistral would never look back and sight him. A Topsider indeed! He was Underman to the core. The dark fed him and drew him on; the tunnels were extensions of him, they sustained and accommodated him as comfortably as the arms, the mouth of a lover.
It was another twenty minutes or so before Monck recognised a change in the air. He pulled up, ducking behind a shelf of rock at the opening to a disused station. Mistral was ahead of him, levering herself up on to a short concrete platform. A pack of rats scattered. Monck heard a voice dip down from the ceiling, where thick criss-crosses of steel peeked through the rotting tiles.
‘You finished him?’
Monck thought he saw something move across the grille, shifting to gain a better view of Mistral perhaps. Mistral shrugged, the steel whip in her hand chinking gently against her leg.
‘I lost him, my sweet,’ Mistral said. ‘There was pandemonium at the Face. They’ve broken through. The door has been opened.’
‘I don’t care about doors. I care about Monck. I want us to make wetwork of him. I want these walls here decorated with his blood. I want a brawn of his head, served up to me on toast. Now… find him. And bring him to me.’
Mistral seemed to diminish before returning towards the tunnel she’d just exited. Monck edged back into the shadows, watching as she sped past him, heading back to the Face. Then he waited, certain that Blore was still watching the platform.
‘Monck?’ The voice sifted down through the scarred ceiling. Monck felt himself rise to reply but he silenced himself and waited. The skin at the back of his neck tightened. Minutes passed. A figure stepped into the tunnel at the opposite end.
I know him, Monck thought as he shrank again into the dark, his heart fluttering like a dying bird. And then: can he see me?
Blore was leaning against the mouth of the tunnel at the other end of the disused platform, hands deep in the pockets of his black overcoat. His head was cocked to one side, the white clenched teeth flashing brightly through the filth that had been powered into him by the subterranean weather, the gusts of wind and the constant fine rain of dust; the black sun that tanned you with grime: an accumulation of decades’ worth of sloughed-off skin.
Monck might have made himself know then, had it out with him – he was straightening, bunching his hands into fists, trying to control the racing madness of adrenaline – were it not for something that Monck at first took to be an illusion. The glints in the earth, the scintillas of silica or quartz or glass, seemed to be unstable. He saw the flints of reflected light spilling lazily out of the tunnel behind Blore, as if they were part of some slow motion landslide. It was only when the ghostly shape of a reaching hand, like a badly-drawn star, emerged from the dark to rest against the wall of the tunnel just behind Blore’s shoulder, that he recognised the lights to be reflections in the curves of about a hundred pairs of eyes.
He felt the pressure in the air behind him changing, increasing, though nothing was moving there that he could see. But then he heard an impossibly faint noise, the slightest tap of an aglet on the end of a shoelace, perhaps, brushing a rail, and he knew he could not go back.
From where Monck was standing, he could see a cross passage linking the remaining sections of the platforms. They were illuminated by a single yellow bulb. The old maroon panel that read East Bound Platform was partially covered by one of the new designs, listing the major Piccadilly stations north. Ceramic insulators were stacked neatly beneath two large black and white fire extinguishers. Keeping to the shadows, he moved towards the passage, past the ubiquitous cables, the chalked graffiti and No Smoking signs, a single length of rusting rail. A cartouche on the wall bore an ornate arrow above the faded words TO THE TRA.
Blore remained standing like a statue, a creation of other people, peering into the gloom as if following Monck’s progress. He was the Tube’s history, all its energy and desperation. He was its blood and sweat, its disease, its tears. Monck found himself moved by the sight of him. Blore was somehow a link, the connective tissue between Topside and Underground. He was London made flesh, a cipher between the living and the dead.
Blore said: ‘During the Second World War, some of the goodies from the British Museum were stored here for protection.’
Monck stopped, the sister platform visible now, safety mere feet away. Blore’s voice was lazy and sharp at the same time. Like honey mixed with lemon. It was not difficult to see how he had recruited his followers, inveigled their minds, got them to do what he wanted.
‘Not a very safe place now though, is it?’ he continued. ‘This astonishing little outpost, where good men sweated and hurt in order that people might be more convenienced. And then they closed it. Not that long ago. Why? Money, of course. Money drives us all, doesn’t it? Well, most of us. They closed it because the lifts were falling apart and they didn’t feel it was worth stumping up the millions to get them right again. The last train was full to bursting, for the first time in the line’s history. Funny isn’t it, at the point when things are on the edge of extinction, how everybody gets interested. Rubberneckers. That’s what we are. Ghouls at a car crash. We don’t want anything to die when death is at its closest. We love tradition, when it’s under threat.’
Monck heard his footsteps, softly approaching, no more than ten feet away. His shadow bleeding across the entrance. That voice had thrown a cloak over his movements.
‘Monck?’
Monck closed his eyes and dropped silently between the rails, scampered into the shelter of the tunnel where he waited. He felt his body cool, his heart turn sluggish as a lake thickened by ice. In this torpor, he barely heard Blore turn on his heel and flee into the veins beneath the city. It took the best part of an hour for him to come out of his trance. By the time he had climbed the dead escalators and bypassed the decaying ticket barriers, picked a way out of the sealed station entrance, he emerged into a dead side street
and God, I was so tired that my mind wouldn’t work properly. I didn’t know where I was; all the light appeared to have seeped into the sky and left the houses and pavements grey and matt for as far as I could see. A cab cruised me, the driver’s eyebrows raised. I nodded and climbed in, mumbled my address and shrank from the windows, trying to make myself small inside a jumper that smelled of oil and death.
Back home I ran a bath, ignoring the urge to bang on Nuala’s door and ask her to perform herbal brain surgery upon me. I needed time to think about what was happening to me. These fugues were occurring with increasing frequency, yet my ability to glean information from them had not improved. I thought about the people in my life at that time, how both Nuala and Greg were detached from the reality in which I saw myself. Was I looking for a way out? Was that why I was making connections with them? Did I, deep down, identify with their dislocation? Nuala might seem in control, but in her lifestyle I saw evidence of an escapee. Her past had exposed her as something of a chameleon. If she had spent the early nineties in two-a-penny skin flicks, and the rest of the decade smelling flowers and practising feng shui, what other guises had she assumed that she wasn’t telling me about?
London Revenant Page 21
