Mind the Gap (3 page)

Water dripped nearby, but she could not locate its source. She studied the walls, searching for any sign of an exit. Without a way out she wouldn’t get far, at least not without a torch.

Something rustled off to her left. Jazz froze, listening for it to come again. Seconds passed before she took another step, then she heard the sound again. Not a rustle, but a whisper. A voice in the darkness, speaking gibberish.

“Who is it? Who’s there?” she said, flinching at the sound of her own voice.

The whispering went on and, from behind her, back toward that spiral staircase, came another voice, secretive, furtive. The Uncles or their lackeys—those dark-suited BMW men—had followed her.

“Shit,” she whispered, and started moving more swiftly.

The whispers followed, but though they certainly must have seen her, no one shouted after her.

“Bloody Churchill,” one of them said, but this was no whisper. She heard it clear as a bell. “Thinks he’s a general but hasn’t the first idea how to fight a war. Get us all killed, he will.”

A child laughed.

A burst of static filled the tunnel, followed by music—a tune she knew, something her mother had hummed while making dinner.

Are the stars out tonight?

I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright.

I only have eyes for you, dear.

Sometimes Mum sang little snippets of it, and Jazz had always cherished those rare moments when her mother seemed to steal a moment’s peace, from the fear that ran through her every day, like deep water under a frozen river. Jazz had asked her several times about the song. All but once, Mum had seemed not to know what she was talking about. That once, she’d relented.

“Was a time your father sang it to me, and meant every word,” she said. She never spoke of it again.

Churchill? What was that about?
The music crackled, a tinny echo, as though it came from some old-time radio. Someone
was
down here in the tunnel with her, but it wasn’t the Uncles or their other BMW men.

The song continued to play, but the child’s laugh did not come again.

Hope and dread warred within her. Whoever lurked in the tunnel could point her way out, if they weren’t mad as a hatter. But that business about Churchill pricked at her mind, and the memory of that voice seeped down her spine.

Retreat not an option, she went on, peering into the darkness for a face. The radio crackled again and other whispers joined in. Jazz’s breath caught. How many people were down here? She caught a few snatches of words, but nothing that made any sense. What had she discovered, some sort of subterranean enclave?

“Sir?” a voice called. “Paper, sir?”

Before she turned, in that singular moment, she understood something that had been niggling at the back of her mind. The laughter, the voices, even the music…they made no echo. The tiles did not throw the sounds back at her.

Her skin prickled as she turned and saw the boy in his cap and jacket, the shape of him more a suggestion in the dark, a fold in the air. He held something out, a newspaper, as if to some passerby. But no one else was there. He did not seem to have noticed Jazz at all.

She backed up, caught her foot on the rail, and sprawled on her ass.

When she sat up, breath hitching, shaking in confusion, the ghost had gone. For what else could it have been? Hallucination or phantom: those were really the only choices, and she feared madness more than haunting.

The music and whispering had stopped.

Jazz stood and stepped carefully back between the tracks. With a quick glance at the spot where she’d seen the darkness form its lines and shadows into a shape, she hurried on, wondering if the whole day might be some kind of breakdown, a series of waking nightmares. What if she was sitting in her bedroom right now, or in a hospital, and none of what she had seen was real?

The thought brought the threat of tears, and she bit her lower lip. The rail glistened with weak light that filtered down the vent shaft ahead. The dripping noise remained, and from far above she could hear car horns and the roar of engines. She moved into the pool of daylight, and it made her wonder just how dark it would become down here when night fell.

She glanced around, searching for an exit. Again, as she had back on the station platform, she felt the burden of strangers’ eyes upon her. Twisting, she peered back the way she’d come, but there were no signs of anyone there.

Taking a breath, she started into the darkness again, hurrying toward the next shaft of light. Focusing only on her footing, she stepped from sleeper to sleeper, catching the glint of the rails just enough to avoid stumbling over them.

The key’s in adapting,
her mother’s voice muttered in her head.
Remember, they can’t find you if you can’t find yourself.

That particular comment had been made while out shopping for a winter coat, the day Mum had bought her the red one with the fur-fringed hood. It hung in her closet now, and would forever, until someone packed it up with the rest of her things and it vanished into another closet or some charity shop.

Jazz swallowed but found that her throat had gone dry. Mum spoke to her from the surface world, from the life that had ended just an hour ago. How much might be memory and how much her own imagination, she did not want to know.

Perhaps she’d become just another ghost in the Underground.

“How’m I doing, Mum? Lost enough?” Jazz said aloud, her voice quavering, the echo soft.

Halfway to the next splash of light, the whispers began again. The Churchill hater spoke up, so close.
Too
close. Jazz spun around, crouched down, and now the walls she had built to keep out the fear gave way and it crashed in around her, drowning her. Her eyes searched the tunnel for ghosts.

“Where are you? What the hell are you doing here?” she cried into the darkness.

A horn beeped loudly behind her.

Jazz spun and saw the car coming at her along the tracks. On instinct, she threw herself to one side. But the car existed only as a shade—a pale, translucent image. As it passed, she heard the engine buzz in her ears, but the tunnel did not echo the sound.

A cacophony of sound erupted around her. Voices. Cars. The music started up again, crackling radio static. “Pennies from Heaven” this time. The newsboy hawked papers. And as she spun, eyes wide, body shaking with the influx of the impossible, the tunnel came alive with faded images. Gas lamps burned on street corners, and she saw the city unfold around her. London—but not the London she knew. The clothes were of another era. The Churchill hater stood outside a pub, blustering drunkenly at another man; couples walked arm in arm, the men in suits and the ladies in dresses.

The ghosts of London.

All she could do to escape was close her eyes, but when she squeezed them shut, an all too earthly image slashed across her mind instead.

No escape.

Jazz screamed, and when she ran out of breath, she inhaled and screamed again. And when she finally opened her eyes, the ghosts were still there. On one corner stood a man in an elegant tuxedo, top hat, and white gloves. He fanned a deck of cards to an unseen audience the way the newsboy had offered his papers to invisible passersby. With his right hand he drew out a single card, and her eyes followed that card for only an instant but long enough for the rest of the deck to vanish. He opened his arms as if to welcome applause, and doves appeared in his hands, spectral wings taking flight. The birds vanished when they reached the roof of the tunnel, passing through as if by some other illusion.

She kept screaming, turning. Nowhere to run from this. Nowhere to hide, if not here.

Another scream joined hers. Higher. A keening, grinding wail that did not issue from a human throat. A siren. But its significance was lost on her until she saw the specters begin to scatter. The newsboy raced toward a regal-looking structure and vanished inside.

An air-raid siren, then, and this was a shelter in those hellish days when the Luftwaffe crossed the Channel and the bombs rained down and the fires burned out of control.

The first explosion knocked her off her feet.

Jazz stopped screaming. She lay on her side on the tracks as dust sifted down from the ceiling, and she told herself the impossible could not touch her. There came another thunderous roar and she felt the ground shudder, and that drove her back to her feet. She staggered toward the next splash of light. In the distance, she saw the ghost of a building reduced almost to rubble, valiant walls standing like jagged, ancient ruins.

Not real,
she told herself.
It’s not real.

But her mother’s voice came back, stronger than her own.
Trust your instincts, Jazz. Always. Down deep, we’ve all got a little of the beast in us.

This time the voice didn’t sound as though it came from inside her head but from the darkness, clear and strong as the Churchill hater’s.

Jazz raced, panicked, for an exit, but nearly halfway to the other end of the abandoned station, she had nowhere to run. The siren rose and fell. Voices shouted from the darkness, but the sepia mirage that had appeared around her had thinned, fading.

To her right, Jazz noticed an anomaly on the wall—a round metal pipe that followed the curve of the roof and then went up through the ceiling of the tunnel. Some other sort of vent, going to the surface. But it came from the floor beneath the abandoned station, and that didn’t make any sense at all. What could be deeper than this?

The air-raid siren became a whisper and then a strange electrical buzz. No, the buzz had been there all along. It came from the pipe bolted to the wall. Jazz put one hand against it and thought she could feel the slightest vibration. She glanced back the way she’d come and found herself truly alone again. With a shuddering breath, she nearly went to her knees with relief. Her ears still rang with the effects of the siren.

With no sign as to where this vent might lead, she continued on her original course but against the wall now, letting her fingers drag along the tiles.

She saw the hole before she reached it. Tiles littered the ground where someone had shattered the wall, tearing down bricks to make a passage. Practically adjacent to one of the ventilation ducts above, the hole in the wall was bathed in light. Beyond the hole was a short passageway, at the end of which another metal door—this one painted a deep red—stood open, and Jazz could see the top of another spiral staircase leading down. This one was cast in concrete. Words had been painted on the passage’s wall, faded now but readable even after so many decades had passed.

DEEP LEVEL SHELTER 7-K

On the door were two posters. Jazz stepped through to peer at them. The top one featured a beautiful illustration of St. George slaying the dragon and, in large type, the declaration
Britain Needs You at Once.

Jazz put a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out again, remembering the phantoms fleeing the air-raid siren.
Britain needs me,
she thought, her mind feeling frayed. She uttered a short bark that might have been a laugh.

The other poster had been torn at the top as if someone had tried to strip it from the door. The letters she could make out made it clear it had been issued by the Metropolitan something or other.

A man and four women were charged and convicted at Great Marlborough Police Court on the 8th March, 1944, with disorderly conduct in a public Air Raid Shelter. Further, on the 13th March, 1944, at Clerkenwell Police Court, a man was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment for remaining in a public Air Raid Shelter while drunk.

It is in the best interests of all that shelters should be kept respectable. Will you please assist in an endeavor to meet this end?

—C.F.S. Chapple

Afraid to go on, afraid to go back, mind numb and body exhausted, Jazz stood and stared down that spiral staircase. The descent appealed to her. Down and down and farther down, as deep as she could burrow into the ground, where no one would ever find her. Down into the darkness to hide forever, just like Mum had told her. But without light…

Yet there
was
light.

“Can’t be,” she whispered. The bulbs in that stairwell off the main station had been a surprise enough. But who in their right mind would keep a light burning down here?

Hands on the walls of the narrow stairwell, she started down, counting steps. Only the dimmest glow came up from below, and she felt blind. She probed with her foot before each step. The twenty-first step was broken. A piece of stone crumbled away under her heel and she slipped, one leg shooting out in front of her, hands flailing for purchase. Her head struck the steps and pain exploded in the back of her skull. Hissing, she squeezed her eyes closed and saw a cascade of stars.

“Fucking hell,” she muttered through clenched teeth, reaching around to gingerly touch the back of her head. She winced at the pain, and her fingers came away sticky. In the dark, her blood was black, but she knew the feel of it. She knew the rusted-metal smell of it. Jazz had become intimate with that odor today and would never forget it.

By the twenty-seventh step, the light had brightened considerably.

The thirty-third was the last.

At the foot of the steps, an orange power cable ran along the ground. To her right she could see several more dangling from the open circular vent—an answer to the mystery up above. But this was nothing official. Someone had jerry-rigged the cables, used that old vent to steal power from the surface.

Deep Level Shelter 7-K was operational, but Jazz had no idea what it was being used as shelter from. This place had never been a Tube station. It was round, just as the train tunnels were, but the way the ceiling arched in a half circle, she wondered if there was more shelter space under the floor, making up the bottom half of the circle. The tunnel might have been two hundred feet long. Work lights hung from hooks all along its length, connected by black or orange cables. At least half of them were out and had not been replaced. There were crates and boxes all along the walls, as well as mattresses stacked with blankets. Metal shelves and cabinets that appeared to have been part of the original design lined one wall, and she could see bottles and cans of stored foods. As she moved closer, she confirmed her suspicions that these were not ancient supplies but far more recent ones. A bit dusty, but they had been put up within the last year or so.