Maybe that’s how the underground people felt too, he thought. It was the only place they could be safe.
“I don’t think I’ll ever really understand how you let yourself end up down here,” he said.
“You were down here once too,” Mack reminded him. “You were just lucky enough to get out.”
“And my mother?” Tom said quietly. “Did she get out?”
Mack glanced away. “I don’t know what happened—”
Mack’s voice cut off as a strange hissing and buzzing echoed in the confines of the now empty station. It seemed to fill Tom’s head, and he put his hands over his ears trying to block it out. It was like the static when television channels used to switch off for the night or the mid-point between stations when tuning the radio. But it was loud—crazy loud—and no amount of blocking his ears made a difference.
“What the…?” Tom said, staring around as though expecting to find a swarm of bees buzzing around his head. Then he realised the noise didn’t sound like bees or even static, but more like a thousand people whispering at the same time.
He turned to Mack, desperate for an answer, but Mack stared, white-faced, at something on the ground in front of them. Taking one hand off his ear and trying to use his shoulder to muffle the sound, Tom directed the torch downward to see what had captured the other man’s attention.
In the light, tendrils of a thick, black substance, like living tar, crept towards them. It didn’t move like a liquid, instead seemed to have purpose. The movement was amoeboid-like, rushing into itself to push that part forward, then retracting back again when it touched a wall or a piece of rail.
Tom stared, his eyes bulging wide. “What the hell is that?”
“Don’t move!” Mack leaned in towards him and hissed as loud as possible above the terrible noise. “It senses vibrations—movement through the ground.”
The horrible whispering continued to pound his eardrums; the sort of sound with the potential to drive someone crazy. He wanted to shake his head, to yell, anything to drive the noise out, but he didn’t dare, not with the thing creeping towards them. The torchlight shook wildly in his hand and Tom prayed that, whatever this thing was, it would not be able to notice the light.
He held his breath, chilled to the bone. One part of the black thing was now only a couple of feet from him and it sent out an arm, creeping closer and closer.
Slowly, Tom edged his foot back, wanting to increase the distance between himself and the thing, but the moment he did so, the black substance shot out towards him, bulging out of itself, rippling like oil on a wet road.
It missed him by mere inches and a thin whine of fear escaped Tom’s throat.
Mack squeezed Tom’s arm, a silent warning for him to keep still. Tom didn’t intend on risking moving again. He didn’t know what would happen if that stuff touched him, but he wasn’t planning on finding out.
The stuff continued to move before them, edging closer and closer. It was like an animal sniffing out its prey—cautious, yet predatory.
How could this thick, black blob be sensing anything? Tom wondered. Did it even know they were there?
The terrible whispering grew louder, thundering around their ears like a horrific, violent waterfall. Tom realised he could make out words within the din, layering over the top of one another. They were hard to understand, but every now and then he caught something, pleading and pitiful and somehow child-like.
Where are we? Where are we? Help us, please. What is happening to me? Please, don’t… No, no…
The words chilled his heart and his mouth ran dry. His heart thumped painfully. What the hell was happening here? He felt like he’d been plunged into some other insane world, a world he didn’t recognised.
Tom became aware of another sound penetrating the hollow cacophony of plaintive voices. The ground began to rumble, a tiny jostling of the molecules of concrete, sending vibrations through the station. Tom’s first thought, in his frightened and panicked mind, was that it was an earthquake, then he remembered where he was and realised a train ran somewhere beneath them.
At the same time his mind processed these thoughts, the liquid black that had been creeping towards them suddenly retreated as quickly as it had appeared. It slunk back into the darkness of the tunnel, melting into the black.
The voices were gone.
Chapter 6
TOM STOOD, SHOCKED, in the now silent station. The silence buzzed against his ear drums, like the tinnitus he used to get after leaving a loud rock concert.
Beside him, Mack’s breath came in heavy gasps, his forehead coated in a thin sheen of sweat. Tom didn’t like seeing the older man ruffled. Whatever just happened, Mack couldn’t handle it.
“I didn’t think it had got this far up,” Mack said, catching his breath.
“Didn’t think what got this far up?” Tom exclaimed. “What the hell was that?”
“The Shadows.”
Tom stared at him. “That’s what made David sick?” His voice sounded hollow and disbelieving.
Mack nodded in the dark. “Yeah.”
Tom ran a hand through his hair and shook his head, incredulous. He was still trying to convince himself what he’d experienced was real and not caused by some crazy acid flashback from some of his more misspent teenage years. This whole thing was insane; not only the idea of that thing being real, but the possibility of it causing his son’s sickness.
Stuff like this didn’t happen in real life.
“But what the hell is it?” he said again.
“No one really knows,” Mack said,” but it’s ancient. The Shadows have been living beneath the earth for as long as anyone can remember. Once people started building the tunnels, they disturbed it. The Watchers were set up to contain the Shadows and it’s pretty much worked, up until now.”
“So what changed?”
“Your son did. As soon as he started to get sick, the Shadows got stronger.”
“But how did that stuff get into Davey?” Tom asked, his stomach churning, a guilty, acidic feeling, afraid he already knew the answer.
“The Shadows seem to go through periods of strength and weakness, times of feeding followed by rest. During one feeding phase, the Watchers were struggling to control it. Like now, the Shadows infiltrated our man-made tunnels and you came into contact with it. The Shadows should have killed you, but didn’t. Instead, the Shadows retreated like you were its kryptonite.”
Tom couldn’t believe he’d seen that thing before and not remember. Had his whole life down here been so terrible that his mind shut it all out? He’d heard the mind used such a thing as a survival mechanism; people who experienced traumatic events had no recollection because the memory would be too much to handle.
But the dreams still plagued him. The nightmares were a way of his unconscious mind trying to make itself heard. When his conscious mind was asleep and resting, the unconscious one simmered beneath the surface, little bubbles of memory bursting in the land of his dreams, releasing little pockets of memory.
“But if the Shadows retreated, how did it get to David?”
“We still don’t know exactly, but we think it may have used you like a carrier and got a ride to the surface.”
“Got a ride out? What? Like a piggyback?”
Mack paused and took a breath. “More like a parasite.”
Tom shivered. “Why didn’t you tell me all of this to start with?”
Mack raised his bushy eyebrows. “Why? Would you have believed me?”
Tom didn’t bother to answer. He barely believed Mack now and he’d seen the thing firsthand.
Cautiously, Mack started to pick his way through the station, heading towards the tunnel the black slime had disappeared into.
“Must we go that way?” Tom asked nervously. “What if it’s still in there?”
“We don’t have much choice. I don’t know any other way.”
Reluctant, Tom followed Mack through the station. The boyish excitement he�
�d felt only minutes earlier had completely disappeared. Now he only had horrible sick feeling in his stomach and the weight of the world on his shoulders. If he believed what Mack told him, he’d made his own son sick. The idea made him furious. He was supposed to protect Davey, not expose him to terrifying black things that somehow got under his skin and threatened his life.
* * *
THE DAY OF David’s diagnosis had been the worst of Tom’s life.
He had never been a big believer in God or religion, yet in the short space of time between the appointment they had made with their general practitioner and that of the referral to the consultant, he found himself praying.
And he wasn’t just praying—he was bargaining:
If David is all right, I will never be short tempered with him again. If David is all right, I’ll take him to the park every weekend without moaning because there’s some sports game I want to watch on television. If David is all right, I’ll never have another drink in my life.
Stupid plea bargains with someone he wasn’t sure he even believed in.
They’d made the appointment with the GP because David had a cold that wouldn’t go away. His nose ran like a tap and he suffered from a fever that peaked and died off, making them think he’d beaten it, but returned within a few hours. He was constantly exhausted and pale and he complained about his legs aching. Abby had taken him to the doctor after the first couple of days, hoping for antibiotics or something to help him feel better, but the doctor sent them away with the usual spiel about antibiotics not touching viruses.
David had typical flu symptoms, but, after nearly a week, both he and Abby started to get worried. David had barely eaten and was frighteningly weak. Abby called the doctor’s surgery and demanded another appointment. Tom carried their son out to the car and then from the car into the surgery—a big, modern, glass box of a building. The child didn’t even glance at the small area filled with toys.
The doctor took out her stethoscope.
“Do you mind if I listen to your chest?” she asked David. She held up the metal disk. “It might be a bit cold.”
David managed a weak smile and she lifted his shirt, meaning to listen to his chest for any sign of infection in his lungs. But, as soon as she lifted his shirt, she stopped.
“Has David had any accidents?” she asked.
“What?” Immediately, Abby grew panicky. “What do you mean?”
“He has a number of bruises across his chest.”
Abby grabbed his t-shirt and pulled it up to see the angry purple marks, three of them in all and each about the size of David’s fist.
“Oh, my God,” she said, her hand going to her mouth. “They weren’t there this morning.” She turned to her son. “David, honey, did you fall out of bed and not tell me?”
David shook his head and tears filled her eyes.
“I don’t want to alarm you,” the doctor said, “but I want to get David in to see a consultant at the hospital. Are you okay to wait in the waiting room while I make some calls?”
Abby turned and looked at Tom, her eyes scared and frantic. “Tom?”
He knew she was asking him if he needed to get back to work. He shook his head. “Don’t worry, I can cancel,” he said, a horrible, sick feeling worming its way into his stomach. It was a sensation he would become incredibly familiar with; the feeling of fear.
“What do you think is wrong with him?” Tom asked the doctor.
“I wouldn’t like to say right now, let’s just get him to the hospital so they can run some tests.”
Abby bit her lip so hard a small speck of blood appeared like a rose in bloom. She wrapped her arms protectively around her son, as if her physical presence could ward off his sickness. Tom put his arm around her and helped her lift David. He felt so much lighter than he had only a week ago.
The speed with which the doctor made the appointment worried them all the more. It had to be serious for them to get in so quickly.
They bundled David back in the car and that was when the praying had started. He kept glancing in the rear view mirror, watching his son’s pale face more than he watched the road. He had to force himself to concentrate, having a car accident wasn’t going to help anyone.
A barrage of tests followed.
First, blood had been taken—tests to confirm what the doctors already thought they knew.
Next came the bone marrow biopsy; David crying in fear and pain as the doctors and nurses stuck huge needles into his hip bone.
Then David suffered the awful lumbar puncture to find out if the disease had reached his spinal column and brain. He had lain still while doctors inserted a hollow needle between the bones in his spine. He’d been silent, but tears had poured down his face the whole time.
And the whole time, Tom was praying...
* * *
THE BATTERIES IN Tom’s torch were starting to die. The beam of light faded significantly and Tom kept banging the side of the torch against his hand to keep the light going. He had the other torch, still with full batteries, in his bag, but he didn’t want to use it until he absolutely had to. The idea of being on his last supply worried him. The idea of those batteries also dying and being stuck down here in the dark with no idea of where he was heading, terrified him. He had no idea how long they’d been walking, but he would struggle to find his way back again. They hadn’t taken many twists and turns, but being in the dark was so disorienting, he thought he would struggle to know his left hand from his right. He wished he’d been more prepared. If only he’d had some idea of what he was getting himself into. He would have made a special trip to the supermarket to stock up on things—extra batteries, for example—instead of just making do with what he had in the back of the cupboard. Of course, if he had any idea of what he was letting himself in for, he probably wouldn’t have come.
Tom sighed and hit his waning torch again. Something like coal crunched underfoot and his shoulder bumped against the side of the wall. For some reason, he seemed to lose his balance easily in the dark.
Something brushed against his cheek and he almost shrieked out loud. He batted the thing away only to feel the light, sticky mesh of cobweb clinging to his fingers. Claustrophobia pressed down around him. After the relative space of the abandoned station, being back in the tunnels somehow felt worse. The tunnels seemed endless, running straight, and they hadn’t seen another tunnel or junction for ages.
Another underground train ran somewhere beneath them, its roar much louder than the ones before.
We must be approaching a crossroads, Tom decided. Another tunnel built across an older one.
Tom waited until the roar had died away and then shouted out to Mack, who still insisting on walking ahead of him, “That one was close.”
Mack slowed and half-turned so he walked sideways.
“It’s going to be a lot closer in a minute,” he said, squinting in Tom’s torchlight. “We’ve got to get past the train to get to the tunnel below.”
Tom’s stomach did a little backwards flip. “We’ve got to walk across a live tunnel?”
“More like drop through it,” the other man admitted.
Mack came to a stop and Tom caught up. He’d stopped next to a purpose-built hole in the tunnel floor. It was about four feet long and two feet wide with a rusted metal ladder running down into it. The sides had been built up with bricks to stop people from stumbling down accidentally.
“I assume we’re going down there?” Tom said, his voice weighted with resignation.
“Yeah, sorry,” Mack said, not sounding in the slightest bit sorry.
Tom stood over the hole. From deep within the guts of the tunnel system came the muffled rumble of a train. Within seconds, the rumble became a roar and, suddenly, the train tore beneath them like an explosion. Air from the tunnel beneath blasted out of the hole and Tom turned his face away, trying to catch his breath. Beneath the roar was the high-pitched shriek of metal on metal, like giant nails being scratched down a blackb
oard.
Then it was gone.
“Shit.” Tom’s heart thundered. “Can’t we go a different way?”
Mack shook his head. “I’d take you another way if I could, but there isn’t one. We have to climb down this one to get to the tunnel below. About thirty feet along the live tunnel, there’s another hole like this one. We need to go down to get into the tunnel beneath.”
“So we’ve got to walk thirty feet along a live tunnel? What if a train comes?” In Tom’s mind, he envisaged himself with his foot trapped under a piece of track while a tube train hurtled towards him.
“We’ve got about three minutes between trains,” Mack said. “We’ll go down one at a time. Make sure you climb down as soon as the train passes.”
“So who goes first?” Tom didn’t like the idea of being left alone up here in the dark, but the thought of stumbling along a live track, unable to find the hole Mack described appealed even less. The three minutes would seem like a lifetime, especially now he found himself in a world that involved giant rats, psychos, and strange creeping black stuff he couldn’t explain.
However short the period of time, Tom didn’t want to be alone.
“I think I should go first,” said Mack. “You don’t know where you’re going and I wouldn’t want you heading off in the wrong direction.”
Another mental image flashed through Tom’s mind, this time of him stumbling along in the dark, frantically trying to find the hole while a train bore down on him. He imagined himself frozen in one spot; a deer in the headlights.
“That’s fine,” he said. “You go first.”
“Good idea.” Mack grinned. “Now remember, you only have three minutes between trains, so, as soon as the train goes past, you have to move fast.”
Tom thought this would probably be the quickest he had moved in the whole of his thirty-seven years.
Paranormal After Dark: 20 Paranormal Tales of Demons, Shifters, Werewolves, Vampires, Fae, Witches, Magics, Ghosts and More Page 300
