The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  He planned to lose himself in some cheap and trashy horror paperback from his little collection. The TV had broken down months ago and instead of replacing it he found that he had got into the habit of reading musty book relics from the ’60s and ’70s, with their yellowing, brittle pages and lurid covers. Gray fancied himself something of a connoisseur when it came to the covers; in fact he felt himself in opposition with the old maxim about never judging a book by them. He harboured the conviction that those featuring a weird photographic composition were invariably superior to those that had artwork depicting the tired cliché-symbols of horror; skulls, snakes or gothic castles for example.

  In fact, he had come in for some jokes at his expense back at the Yard over his choice of reading matter. Most of his colleagues talked about little except what they watched on TV the night before, often sleazy porn videos that they’d “loaned” from the Obscene Publications division. They’d taken to calling him “The Weird Detective” behind his back and on one occasion he’d turned around sharply to find a group of constables miming having vampire fangs by putting their index fingers at the corners of their mouths. Gray made sure thereafter that he wasn’t seen reading any of his books during the little time he had for lunch. Instead he read one of the broadsheet papers as he consumed his sandwiches at his desk. His alienation from his colleagues caused him pain and he suspected that the department would run more smoothly were he not there.

  What Gray saw as he passed by in his car appeared to be some sort of stunted, emaciated creature peering through the trellis gates of Kentish Town Underground Station. The thing was only around four or five feet tall and dressed in black ragged overalls. Its face was obscured by a mass of dusty shoulder-length hair.

  It was gone 1:00 a.m. when Gray passed the Underground Station, and it had been closed for only a short time. He had pulled over to the side of the road and looked back in order to see whether the apparition was still there, but there was no sign of it at all. Doubtless, he thought, his colleagues back at the Yard would have laughed at what he thought he saw; too many of those damn books he read. But Gray felt his heart racing in his chest. He could not dismiss the thing that easily from his mind. What he’d seen was no product of the imagination. It had really been there.

  Although the station was closed, it might not yet be deserted. Once the train service finished there were still staff working on the platforms and in the tunnels. An army of cleaners called “Fluffers” made their way along the lines and scoured them for debris. All manner of litter had to be cleared away, beer-cans, half-eaten junk food, newspapers, even tumbleweeds composed of skin and human hair. There was also the “Gangers”; the engineers who checked track safety. Perhaps Gray had simply glimpsed one of those overnight workers having a break, one whose similarity to the uncanny thing on the front cover of The Secret Underground was nothing more than a trick of the light.

  Nevertheless, what he had observed remained in his thoughts, causing uneasy dreams when he finally slept: dreams of endless subterranean tunnels and of a gaunt silence punctuated by a distant rustling or whispering noise. Had he not seen whatever it was at the station (or whatever he thought it was) the case that came to his attention afterwards might not have seemed significant and worth pursuit.

  As he sat at his desk the next morning, sipping at a cup of vile instant coffee, Gray flicked through the case files in his in-box. He had a feeling that had become increasingly commonplace during the course of the last few months. It was that the investigations to which he had been assigned were effectively a waste of effort. The assault that he’d suffered months ago during the arrest of Montrose the serial rapist had left him hospitalised for weeks and resulted in internal ruptures that would, he had been advised by the surgeon, require a much more sedate lifestyle. The Yard had done the best they could under the circumstances and found him a role, albeit desk bound, but although his initial assignments had been current Gray discovered that as time passed he was being asked to examine cases that had little chance of being solved. The bulk of these were missing persons.

  Scarcely sociable before, Gray had turned further inwards after the beating. It had affected his mind just as much as his body. Somehow he had allowed his old friends to drift away and found excuses not to keep in touch with them. He felt himself to be little more than an empty shell and contact with others only served to reinforce the impression. The Yard offered Gray counselling to help him come to terms with the trauma caused by the Montrose incident, but he found the idea even more repellent than his doctor’s suggestion that he take a course of anti-depressants. When fate worked upon him he intended to adapt to it and not resist. Even so, he felt like a missing person who had himself been assigned to trace other missing persons.

  Gray ran his tongue over his scalded lips, again cursing the too-hot and foul-tasting coffee, when his attention was taken up by a communiqué that had come in only a few hours earlier. Although a missing persons report is not usually filed until some days after a disappearance (except where children are involved), this one had been “fast-tracked” due to there being no question of the subject having absented himself deliberately. The missing individual was a tube train driver (or “operator” as they were now called). His name was Adam Drayton. The curious thing was this: he had abandoned his train between the Camden Town and Kentish Town stations on the Northern Line. It had been the very last service of the night, due to terminate at High Barnet at 1:30 a m. Moreover, if there had been any passengers in the carriages then they too had vanished.

  Early in the morning a replacement driver had shunted the train into a siding. On the front of the case file a joker in the office had scrawled the words “Mary Celeste Tube? A Case for the Weird Detective?” with a marker pen.

  But Inspector Gray, through some bizarre coincidence, was one of the few people who would recognise the name “Adam Drayton” in another connection. For it was also the name of the author/editor of that outré book of urban legends published under the title The Secret Underground, whose cover preyed upon his mind.

  Gray spent the afternoon interviewing Drayton’s colleagues in the staff mess room of the train depot just outside Finchley Central Station. This was where the tube drivers spent their time between shifts, sitting around drinking coffee, smoking their cigarettes and reading newspapers. They were a talkative bunch although the inspector could not help noticing their mistrust and fear of him as a representative from an outside authority. Some of them even seemed to believe that Drayton’s disappearance was an internal matter and should be left to the union to investigate. Outside interference, whether from the law or elsewhere, was certainly not welcome. Still, there were one or two who retained a sense of individuality and were able to realise that Gray had not come in order to apportion any blame, merely to discover what may have led Drayton to act in the manner that he did.

  One of the drivers, Carlos Miguel, a Castilian, was particularly communicative. He had settled in this country after leaving Madrid in the early 1990s. He had been almost alone in befriending Drayton, who had been regarded by the others as an oddball whose political views were not sufficiently radical. Miguel was a tall, distinguished man in his forties with a shock of jet-black hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. He had shared Drayton’s enthusiasm for the recondite and whilst the others talked of union activities or the football results, the two men had retreated to a corner and held their own discussions.

  Had Gray not been aware of Drayton’s editorship of that paperback The Secret Underground he doubted that he would have achieved quite the same rapport with Carlos Miguel.

  “So,” the Spaniard declared, “you know of el libro de Drayton?”

  “Yes,” Gray replied, “I think it’s a bit garish but the cover’s particularly . . .”

  Miguel cut in.

  “Señor, you know that Drayton only applied to become a train operator so that he could travel the tunnels of the Northern Line and examine their mysteries?”

  Gray loo
ked blank and shook his head.

  “Well,” Miguel went on, “you must understand that it would not be mistaken to say that he was obsessed with them. Drayton told me that the Northern Line has the longest continuous Yerkes tunnel on the network, over seventeen miles long. The stretch between East Finchley and Morden. Also it has the deepest. At Hampstead 900 feet below ground. He had numerous theories about what was down there; fantástico, ¿no?”

  “Speculations, rumour, hearsay,” Gray responded, “amounting to nothing more than fiction. He was just an editor of a horrible series of urban legends. I confess that the parallel between his disappearance and obsession is striking but . . .”

  “Perdón, señor, but it is more than that simple fact. Drayton was my friend; it was in me that he felt he could confide. Las estaciónes fantasmas, you know of them? In English: the ghost stations? North End, City Road, South Kentish Town and King William Street? These were what obsessed Drayton.”

  “The abandoned stations?”

  “Sí, abandoned. Pero in Drayton’s eyes, no. Taken over he would have replied. No longer safe to use. Señor, if you are operating the last train on the line it is easier to slow down when you wish, no? Perhaps while travelling through one of those stations and even bringing trains to a complete stop. There are not so many passengers and they are too drunk or sleepy to complain at that time of night, ¿tú comprendes?”

  “Are you suggesting that Adam Drayton stopped his train and got out at one of these ghost stations?”

  “Como una palomilla atraída por la llama . . .”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “. . . like a moth drawn to a flame.”

  That evening, once Gray had got back to his cramped flat in Tufnell Park, he sat down in his easy chair with his copy of The Secret Underground. He flicked back and forth through its yellowed brittle pages, glancing at them over and over again. The book was divided into several chapters, each specialising in a subterranean urban legend: (1) Cases of Posthumous Mutation in London Cemeteries (2) Derelict reverse Skyscrapers 1936–57 (3) Mass disappearance of Persons sheltering in the Underground during the Blitz (4) Graffiti or Occult Symbolism? (5) Suppressed Eyewitness accounts during the Construction of the Underground Railways 1860–1976 (6) The Fleet Line extension to Fenchurch Street must be Halted (7) Secret Bunkers or Extermination Centres? (8) The deep level Platforms of the proposed Express Tube: Why they caused Insanity (9) The Hidden Shafts that connect Subterranean London.

  There was one paragraph in the final chapter that seemed to be the inspiration for the uneasy dreams Gray had experienced. It ran as follows:

  “Most of the city is now underground and not above the surface, and I scarcely need list its innumerable tunnels, subterranean car parks, cellars, crypts, bunkers, basements, vaults, passageways, and sewers. Every building in London has an underside buried deep in the earth. Beneath our feet are the ruins of Anglo-Saxon Lundenwic and of Roman Londinium. The contemporary city will, in time, be swallowed up. This neon and concrete labyrinth will become an Atlantis of catacombs. The higher we build up, the deeper it is necessary to build down in order to support the structures above. All the nightmare sewage that we pump into the depths, all the foulness and corruption, the abortions, the faeces and scum, the blood and diseased mucus, but mostly the hair: what a feast for those underground beings that exist in darkness, and shun the sunlight! Those things below hate us and have every reason to do so.”

  His attention kept jumping from the text to the series of bizarre black and white photographs throughout the book. Quite where Drayton had obtained them from was not made clear; they were not credited. They may even have come from his personal collection. What they showed was this:

  (Front cover) A blurred humanoid figure seen from a passing tube train whose face is almost completely covered by its hair. Between the strands there seems to be a mouth lined with shark-like fangs. The haggard creature is backing into a siding, away from the light.

  (pg.18) A photographic record of a series of exhumed graves with empty coffins whose bases had been torn apart.

  (pg.33) A blueprint of a subterranean reverse-tower with forty-five storeys and access shafts radiating from it in all directions, some leading to burial grounds, others to sewers etc. bearing the legend “North End (Hampstead)”.

  (pg.49) What appears to be a series of bloody, smeared handprints on the white wall tiles of British Museum Station during its use as an air-raid shelter circa 1941.

  (pg.87) Human bones, including a skull, photographed lying alongside the tracks of an Underground tunnel.

  (pg.102) Graffiti scrawled (in charcoal?) on the side of 1972 Mk. 1 train stock that reads “THE HUNGRY CANNOT SLEEP”, “WE CRAWL THROUGH GRAVES”, “THE DARKNESS BEHIND YOUR EYES” and “BELOW THERE IS ONLY PAIN”.

  (pg.126) A sewer chamber choked by vast quantities of hair hanging from a curved ceiling of Victorian brickwork.

  It was relatively easy for Gray to obtain a search warrant in order to enter the disused South Kentish Town station. Although above ground the building was now occupied by a massage parlour where once the ticket hall had been, all the subterranean shafts, corridors and other passageways were still owned by London Underground. Since their abandonment there had been no reason to maintain them and parts of the former station were unsafe. In order to gain access Gray had to agree to be accompanied by a track maintenance engineer who worked on that stretch of the Northern Line and who was familiar with the site.

  This engineer, John Heath, arranged to meet Gray outside the massage parlour at the corner of Kentish Town Road and Castle Place. The inspector parked his car directly in front of the building and was struck by the fact that its exterior still had the appearance of an Underground Station, lacking only the familiar sign displayed outside. Hanging around in front of the entrance to the newsagents was a small man in a yellow safety helmet and boiler suit. He carried a heavy bag with a sub-contractors’ logo on it. His hands were entirely covered with a thick layer of soot. Doubtless it was the man who been assigned to assist Gray.

  Heath looked just like a throwback to the 1960s. His hippie-length hair was brittle and grey as dust. Over his mouth and nose he wore a loose protective mask. He also wore a pair of John Lennon style glasses with thick lenses that made the eyes behind them look liquid. He was really quite horribly ridiculous.

  After Gray had produced his police ID, the two went inside, and the Inspector explained their purpose to the owners of the massage parlour (who seemed relieved that the search was not connected with what went on at their premises). Then Heath, consulting a map of the structure, led Gray down into a storage cellar at the back of the establishment where access to the emergency stairs could be gained.

  The old lift shafts were useless. Their cages and all the workings had been removed back when the station was closed in 1924, but the stairway to the upper lift landing and the emergency staircase to the lower lift landing were passable. The entry doors were padlocked and Heath sought and tried several keys drawn from his bag before he found the correct ones to use.

  “They,” Heath said, his voice muffled by the baggy mask covering his mouth and nose, “told me why you want to get down here. Anyway it’s pointless. We already looked for Drayton. All you’re doing is putting yourself in danger.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” replied Gray, “just get on with it. You do your job and I’ll do mine, okay?”

  “Watch your step as we go. These old passageways are treacherous. Even if you don’t wind up falling into a ventilation shaft, you might stumble in front of a passing train. Hear the noise?”

  As he unlocked the door there came from far below in the depths the sound of carriages rumbling along distant tracks, followed moments later by a powerful draught of musty air.

  Heath chuckled. He turned on a powerful torch and aimed its beam along the stairway and around to the dark-green tiled walls at the turn ahead. The steps were littered with debris.

  Gray wa
s amazed at how familiar and yet how strange their surroundings appeared. Like any Londoner he had used the tube system on innumerable occasions and had passed through the subterranean mazes of many stations, though always when they were illuminated by overhead strip lighting, with hurried passengers making their way to or from a platform. But here the darkness was in control and every echoing footfall reinforced the grim feeling of total isolation. And yet it was only the withdrawal of light and of other people that created this feeling: actually it was just the same as any other tube station would be after the services had stopped running. Except that this was no temporary interruption to be resumed in the morning. This really was what Carlos Miguel called Una estación fantasma.

  “Did you know Adam Drayton?” Gray asked in order to break the gaunt silence between the sound of passing trains.

  He could only see the back of Heath. The engineer’s slightly hunched form crept downwards along the steps, apparently intent solely upon what he was doing. But he finally responded after what seemed to be a considered pause.

  “Oh yes,” Heath said, “I knew of him all right. He was legendary on the Northern Line. Kept stopping his train at odd places and holding up the services. Only worked at night, when it didn’t matter so much. The union stepped in to stop him getting the sack, said he was worried about safety.”

  “Safety?”

  “The union said it was faulty signals that were to blame. And strange noises on the track. Made him cautious. Better to be safe than sorry. Go-slow is preferable to taking chances. That’s what the union said.”

  They had reached the bottom of the stairway and emerged onto the upper lift landing. The tiles here were a grimy cream and red colour. In the circle of light cast by Heath’s torch, he caught glimpses of advertising posters from the early 1920s that had been left up on the tiled walls of the corridor ahead; LIFEBUOY, BOVRIL, OXO, WRIGLEY’S and GUINNESS. Another tube train roared through one of the tunnels below and the accompanying blast of air flapped the torn parts of the posters.