by Kate Griffin
We took the first bus to the Angel. Outside the underground station we looked around for a few minutes, until I spotted a small black-and-white rat, painted below an ATM by the Bank of Scotland offices. It wore a long scarf, carried a suitcase and a bunch of rosemary wrapped in paper like it was a bouquet of roses; and its long black nose was twitching towards the south.
We followed the nose of the rat down to Rosebery Avenue, where we found a mock ATM painted in a walled-up window; from its money dispenser there emerged a huge mechanical arm, clutching in its claws a child. She was almost the image of the little angel-winged girl who’d lost her balloon, and held her hands to her mouth in a gesture of surprise.
The arm was gesturing towards Farringdon Road, so we walked down that wide, dull artery of traffic, until the yellow brick walls of a railway line grew up on one side and Oda said, “Swift.”
She was pointing at a hoarding covered with posters advertising bands, albums, low-budget films and desperate struggling magazines. In one corner was a small stencilled image of a train, forever looping in on itself, round and round until it swallowed its own tail, the carriages blending into each other.
Oda, who’d said almost nothing all evening, now asked, “Where does it want us to go?”
I groaned. “Circle line.”
“Circle line where?”
“Where isn’t the important part.”
“What does that mean?”
“Come on,” I said. “We need to buy a few things.”
I’d bought a book of sudoku, a biro, a packet of chewing gum and a small trashy romantic novel, placing them all with loving care in a single plastic shopping bag. At the local pub, I was now trying to convince the girl behind the bar that she wanted to serve me coffee, not beer, before Oda’s patience snapped.
“What are you doing?” Oda demanded, indicating the bag.
“Sacrifices.” I was secretly pleased that she’d asked before I’d been obliged to tell her, and felt determined to make her suffer for her curiosity.
“Sacrifices for what? Why aren’t we taking the Circle line and finding the Whites?”
“We’ve got to wait,” I replied.
“Why?”
“For the last train.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what the symbol means. It’s not just the Circle line; it’s the train that swallows itself again, travelling round and round forever, no stations, no stops – it’s not just ‘Go take the Circle line.’ It’s much more complicated. Sacrifices.” I waved the bag with the sudoku book.
“You are deliberately being cryptic,” she exclaimed. “Why?”
“Because I don’t like you.”
“On my word your friend’s life hangs. And yours,” she added, eyes narrowing.
“So you tell us,” we said. “It must frighten you, not being entirely sure what we will do next.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” she retorted, her voice cold and level. “You are a dead nothing, whatever forces you’ve made bargains with.”
“That’s not the point,” I said in my gentlest, most placating tone. “You are afraid of not being certain.”
“No.”
“If you say so.”
“You know nothing,” she added vehemently.
“I know that I want a coffee, and that beer would be a bad idea, all things considered.”
“Why? What’s so important about catching the last train?”
“I’d much rather let you work that out for yourself,” I said, and resumed trying to order coffee.
At 11.45 p.m. Oda and I walked down towards Farringdon station. The last train of the evening was written up on the board for six minutes past midnight, in blue marker pen. There weren’t many people waiting on the platform. Some late-night theatregoers lingered, in their pearls and smart suits, at a distance from a group of girls whose feet ached from having got lost hereabouts in the wrong kind of shoes. At the opposite end of the platform, pushed into a brick alcove by their passion, a couple of men soaked in sweat and hormones were engaged in the longest, loudest kiss we’d ever seen. I tried not to stare. We were fascinated.
A Metropolitan line train came, heading towards Baker Street, where, selfishly, it had decided to terminate; the girls got on it anyway, as did the theatregoers in their silk scarves. A Hammersmith and City line train didn’t do much better, giving up the ghost at Edgware Road, but that was clearly far enough for the two men, who, to the surprise of the polite Arab-looking couple sitting in the carriage amid piles of free daily newspapers strewn across the floor, resumed where they’d left off.
The indicator cleared itself of all but one more train – on the westbound Circle line, its destination picked out in bright orange dots. A group of young men and women ran onto the platform, giggling with the adrenalin of their own having-nearly-missed, until one of the girls, dressed almost entirely in cold pink skin and bra strap, was sick behind one of the benches. Oda scowled and looked away. The girl’s friends clustered around her, patting her, soothing, stroking her hair, and dabbing at the remnants of bile around her mouth until with a final heave she was empty, and sat down on the bench and started to cry. We felt a sudden burning in our face at the sight of it, which we could not understand or control, and it was only Oda’s cold expression that stopped us from sharing the girl’s distress.
At 12.09 a.m. precisely, the Circle line train rattled and wheezed into the station. Oda stood up quickly, slinging her bag onto her shoulder; but I caught her arm, pulling her back down. She said, “But the…”
“No. Not this one. The last train.”
“This is the…”
“Trust me.”
She hesitated, then reluctantly sat back down. The girls and boys staggered onto the train, which with a clunk and a beeping of door alarms slammed its carriages shut and, engine whirring with a rising pitch, rattled its way out of the station. It passed the graffiti on the opposite wall: long, incomprehensible names made entirely of angles, and doodles in green paint. By a board showing you where to go for trains to Luton, someone had drawn a pair of closed black-and-white eyes, each eyelash ending in a long Egyptian curve.
After a moment Oda said, “You’ve got a plan, sorcerer?”
I nodded as, above us, the indicator board swept itself clean with a single orange asterisk, and didn’t display any more messages. I stood up, and walked down the platform past signs for
“Sensational!!!”
Bollywood Romance – a Love Story for Our Time!
“The Most Amazing Thing I’ve Ever Seen!!” – News of the World
“Astonishing!” – Time Out
and further down.-.-.
The new voice of now! – Love and Lost – a heart-breaking album to inspire a generation.
When I reached the end of the platform, I pushed back the swinging “Danger! Do not cross!” sign, ducked past the array of mirrors to show the parked train driver the platform’s length, and followed the narrowing, dirty concrete slope of the platform down towards the ballast and electric spice of the line. I could taste the thick, smoky dirt of the tunnel on the end of my tongue, the dryness of it in the air; I could feel the buzz of thousands of volts in the track beside me, feel the cold wind of the last train’s passage still being pumped through the tunnel, fading into the heavy heat of the motionless underground. With my back pressed against the rough, black wall bursting with coils of cabling that hummed even through their once-coloured plastic sheaths, I slipped down onto the narrow remainder of the platform’s edge, into the darkness.
Oda stared at me from the light of the platform itself with undisguised surprise and distaste. “What are you doing?”
“Oda,” I said, “when Hunger came looking for us at Bond Street station, do you really think he would have left you alive? Do you honestly believe he would not have drunk your blood as well, just to see if it tasted the same as the sweat on your skin as you died? Trust me. Please.” I held out a hand to her. Scowling, she pushed pa
st the “Danger!” sign, picking her way down until she squatted next to me. She was straining, I noticed, to avoid the bulky snake of cables locked into the wall, even as her eyes swerved uneasily to the electric rail. In that darkness, we had no space, and we could feel the heat of her proximity on our skin, a strange, living warmth in the stale gloom of the tunnel’s edge. We stared at her, curious and unashamed, until, glancing up, she saw our eyes on her and quickly looked away, muttering, “Jesu preserve us.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I can see them in the dark.”
“What?”
“Your eyes. Like a cat’s – they reflect blue.”
“It was an almost perfect resurrection,” we hazarded.
She spat into the dark. Her spit fizzed off the live rail.
I said, “I can’t help… it’s not… sorry.”
She glanced up again, then away before I could see anything but the question in her face. “What are we doing here, exactly?”
“Waiting for the guard to inspect the platform.”
She only grunted in response, and we felt the heat of her breath tickle our skin again, like the brush of dying sparks.
We didn’t have to wait long. The guard came, muttering into his radio, a few minutes after the last train had left. He walked briskly along the platform’s edge, picking up bits of litter with a prong on the end of a plastic stick, opened up the vending machine, took the day’s coins and filled it with tomorrow’s old, overpriced chocolate and cans of drink. That took us nearly ten minutes of sitting, huddled in the darkness at the edge of the platform, trying to limit the sound of our own breaths.
When he finished, he turned the lights down, so that the entire place was washed with a low pinkish-orange neon glow rising up from behind the benches, reflecting strangely off the glass panels of the advertising boards. I heard the clattering of the iron gate at the front of the station being drawn shut. At my side Oda whispered, “Enough?”
I nodded.
She scrambled back up the platform, hastily moving away from me and self-consciously brushing the dirt off her clothes. I looked up at the dead indicator board and said, “We just have to wait now.”
“Wait for what?” she groaned.
“You wanted to be part of this so badly you had to attack me and kidnap a man,” I said, surprised at how calm I sounded. “Now you just watch and learn.”
I sat down on a bench, wrapping my dirty coat around me against the cold and sudden stillness of the place, and waited. Oda paced, jaw set in a tight, angry line. I tried to judge the minutes by the length of her walk – four progressions back and forth seemed to equal roughly a minute. My eyes felt heavy, my skin hot and tired, my hair dirty and my stomach full of lead. I let my head hang down, although we stayed on edge, ears more alert even as our eyelids fell, and drifted. We heard the drip of a water pipe and the distant rumble of a bus somewhere overhead. Our senses drifted without thinking into those of a mouse scuttling along by the electrified rail, sniffing out discarded food. We enjoyed the sensitivity of its nose, twitching it and feeling our entire face change shape slightly with that movement, and the sensitivity of our whiskers as they picked up on the reverberation of Oda’s walking, like each footstep was the last hum of a ringing bell left in the air.
“Sorcerer!”
Her voice frightened the mouse, so I let its mind go and quickly looked up. Oda’s face was a garish pinky-orange in the light of the platform, and her eyes were turned up towards the indicator board. In large orange letters, it read:
“1) Circle line via KingsX – 2 mins”
And nothing more.
For a moment we both looked at it, then Oda said, “Is this a spell of yours?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s the last train,” I explained gently. “The real last train. It’s… like the Beggar King, or the Bag Lady.”
“This means nothing,” she snapped, and the anger meant there was fear too – fear of magic in general, or the train itself; I couldn’t be sure.
I struggled with the words. “Some ideas are more than just random moments of good inspiration. Some ideas become real whether you mean them or not.”
“So what… idea is it that’s due here in two minutes?”
“The train that doesn’t ever stop travelling,” I said. “That goes round and round the Circle line forever.”
A cold wind on my face, from the end of the tunnel, a smell of dirty deep underground. We breathed it in, deeply.
“That’s absurd.”
“For a woman who has dedicated her life to the eradication of mystic forces, you have a very limited comprehension of what you’re dealing with.” A distant growing te-dum, te-dum, te-dum. The hairs on my scalp twitched with the coldness rising up and tickling my skin; the track itself gave a creak of added strain. I got to my feet, picking up my small plastic bag of sudoku, biro and chewing gum.
“And this train…” she said, struggling to keep the fear out of her voice, “this will take us to the Whites?”
“The Whites should already know we’re coming,” I said.
“How?”
I pointed across the other side of the platform. By the board telling you how to get a train to Luton, the pair of painted-on black-and-white Egyptian eyes, with their long curves and deep, stylised quality, were now open. Their black pupils and grey-flecked irises stared right at us.
Oda followed my gaze. She stammered, “It’s not a trick of the mind.”
“No.”
“Is what you do always like this, sorcerer?”
“No. But if it was, life would be perfection,” we said. We walked towards the edge of the platform, toes peeking over the edge of the yellow “Do Not Cross” line. In the tunnel at the other end of the station, a pair of dull white lights appeared, like the eyes of a hunting cat, glowing bigger and bigger out of the darkness. As they emerged, so did the dim light of a driver’s compartment, empty except for a black shadow of no definable features. Growing with the sound of the rattling, hissing, spitting wheels as they threw up fat blue sparks across the ballast of the track and with the shrieking of brakes like the final breath of a dying banshee, the last train pulled up onto the platform of Farringdon station, and opened its doors.
The last train had once been white, but its paintwork was stained off-grey with neglect and age, and its surface scratched and tainted with brown bubbling rust. Its windows were almost impossible to see through, they were so scratched and criss-crossed with messages scoured into them. The doors, when they opened, did so with a scrape like fingernails down a blackboard, as rust edged over rust. Looking into the dim yellow glow of the carriages, I saw no passengers, just a slatted floor stained black by trodden-in chewing gum, and scattered with the remnants of old newspapers that drifted like feathers in a breeze. The seat covers were so thin, you could see the stuffing beneath, where it hadn’t already spilled out; the glass on the emergency alarm was cracked and looked like it might fall out of its holder at any moment; and the fabric straps hanging from the support poles in the ceiling swayed gently by themselves after the train had stopped. At either end of the carriage the windows were open wide, and the place hummed with ventilation rising from behind the battered seats.
Oda said, “This is what I think they meant by Satanic inclination.”
“You haven’t even given it a go,” I said. “Think of how small the human race would be if people didn’t give such inclinings a chance.”
I stepped cautiously up into the carriage, and when nothing happened, I turned and faced her, still standing uncertainly on the platform. “You trusted me at Bond Street,” I said, holding out my hand. “Trust me now.”
“Is it… necessary?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She took my hand; she stepped up into the carriage. Almost immediately, the doors started to wail, a high-pitched, shrilling, too-loud sound that made me wince away, as with a heavy, final bang, t
hey slammed shut. The train jerked sharply, and started to move. I wrapped my hand into one of the fabric loops drooping down from the ceiling and said, “I have a confession.”
“What?” she asked, as the train slowly picked up speed with a low whine.
“I’ve never taken the last train before.”
“Why not?”
“It’s easy to get lost.”
She grunted, then nearly lost her footing as with another jerk, the train accelerated more sharply, the warm glow of the platform vanishing as we hit the tunnel. She dropped her bag and wrapped her hands quickly round a pole in the middle of the carriage, pressing herself against it for support as we picked up speed. The wind from the open window at the far end of the carriage tore past us and away as we ploughed into the darkness, pulling at hair and clothes until my coat snapped like a flag in a gale. I saw the pale red and yellow shades of the dirty cabling outside the window draw apart as tracks joined, split, widened; then saw the cables disappear entirely, the light from inside the carriage falling on, as far as I could tell, nothing at all, no texture outside, not even the curve of a black wall, just blackness itself. The lights flickered in the ceiling and for a moment, in each intermittent flash, the carriage wasn’t empty, but I was standing pressed in shoulder-to-shoulder with a hundred grey faces, featureless, with perhaps the hint of a hat here or the suggestion of a baby’s buggy there, blocking up the doorway, pressed in so tight that for that moment I could barely breathe and the heat of it burnt down to my bones, before the lights shuddered again and the carriage was cold and empty, the wind driving at our faces like each particle held microscopic knives, and a grudge to make it worse.
Oda screamed over the roar, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
“Give it a minute!” I shouted back.
A flash of light outside, and for a second I saw the walls of Kings Cross St Pancras underground station – but only a second, and we made no attempt to stop; the entire length of the platform was gone by in the time it took to draw a breath. Newspapers billowed around my knees, old crunched-up drinks cans and hamburger packets rolled down the carriage as we picked up yet more speed, and when I tried to lift my foot, the chewing gum glooped and tugged my ankle back down, so only with a great physical wrench could I get free of its hold.
