The Seventh Candidate (40 page)

He reached the first of the niches set at
200-meter intervals for the safety of the track crews. A red bulb
glowed feebly above it. Another red light opposite turned green. He
started forward again and had covered a dozen meters when he heard
the train ahead. He stumbled back to the niche, unslung the
knapsack and ladder and pressed his back against the rough concave
wall. As the rumble loudened he grasped obscure pipes overhead. The
red and green lights down the track floated into sight, grew with
the roar. He squeezed his eyes shut.

It blasted past in seconds, compressing the
air out of his lungs, pulling at him.

A mercifully short maintenance crew train.
The rumble died away.

He stood motionless in the niche for
quarter of an hour. Except for the chirp of crickets about him
there was absolute silence. By now the corridors and platforms were
empty. The folding brass gates of the entrances to
Central
Station
had been
deployed and locked.

He trotted back to the tunnel entrance,
hoisted himself back onto the empty silent platform and started
in.

He printed the first message to Teddy in
Basic White on a green lawn.

Now the image.

He dipped the second brush in the red paint
and summoned up the image as he’d seen it on a hundred thousand
posters, that image he’d effaced and caused to be effaced for over
a decade. He kept it before him as though what his hand was now
perpetrating above the message had originated in other minds, he
doing no more than a mechanical job of transcription.

He operated with fantastic rapidity,
platform after platform, corridor after corridor with no idea of
the passage of time. He printed his message on one out of every
twenty posters. With what crowned the words to Theo it eclipsed all
the neighboring graffitied posters.

Red and gigantic, it couldn’t fail to
attract Theo’s censorious attention.

It was only at 4:13am that he became aware
of his inexplicable blunder. A huge proportion of the posters he’d
chosen to bear the message and that image were
Ideal
posters. How could he have done that? First one of
his operators and now the director and founder of
Ideal Poster
himself engaged in
self-sabotage.

That was minor. He thought of the two
operators permanently assigned to
Central Station
. In an hour and a half they would be there and
efface most of the messages. He would have to wait and head them
off. But how could he openly ask them to spare the most shameless
of the graffiti?

Then with a certain relief he remembered
that tomorrow – today, actually – was Sunday. The
Ideal
operators wouldn’t come until
Monday morning.

He was placing the last of the jars in the
knapsack and had already reduced the ladder when a challenging
shout startled him. Tiny at the far end of the corridor two
underground employees in dark-blue uniforms were trotting toward
him. “What are you doing here?” one shouted. “Stop!” the other
shouted. They were echoing the question and command he’d been
directing to himself for hours.

He grabbed the ladder and the knapsack and
started running awkwardly. The ladder wagged between his legs,
almost tripping him up. The jars in the knapsack chinked
dangerously. He finally reached the escalators rolling on in the
emptiness. He glanced over his shoulder. He could hear the fast
echoing slap of their shoes and their multiplied shouts but they
were still in the corridor. He lay face down on the descending
escalator, hidden, he hoped, by the waist-high ramps. The machine
dumped him on the pavement of the lower level.

He picked himself up, raced down a short
corridor and took the left fork. Their shouts echoed everywhere.
Now he burst out onto a platform near the black mouth of the
tunnel. With no hesitation he let himself down onto the tracks for
the second time that night and went on running in that deep gloom
punctuated by red now green caged lamps. A different tunnel but
identical to the first. He slid down to a squatting position in a
niche. Maybe he was still being pursued. But he couldn’t go any
further. He tried to stifle his hoarse gasps.

There was a low grease-smeared iron door set
in the dark base of the tunnel opposite. He got up, stepped very
high over the third rail and reached the door. He pushed it open.
He had to stoop to enter. A caged bulb inside burst into weak but
blinding light. It spilled out on the gleaming rails. He quickly
shut the door behind him. A ventilator started up.

He found himself in a tiny storeroom with
unpainted roughly daubed cement walls. It looked disaffected.
Greasy garments were dumped in one corner, in another corner lay a
heap of obscure rusty tools. Great bolts and spikes were heaped on
old newspapers.

The light went out. The ventilator collapsed
into stillness. He pulled the door open. Light again. The
ventilator started up. He saw an old fashioned toggle switch and
turned it on. After a while he opened the iron door on the tracks
and dared look up-track from where he’d fled. He could see a
pinhead of light: the end of the tunnel. Was he being pursued?

Too exhausted to resist, he pulled the
greasy work-clothes into the semblance of a pallet and stretched
out. He meant to rest for a few minutes before resuming his flight
to the next station. The underground would be reopening in half an
hour.

When the roar and rattle awoke him he opened
his eyes on blackness. He was totally confused. His flat? The
office? The hospital? The roar died away. Memory came back. He
looked at the luminous dial of his watch.

3:07.

Had time regressed? Then he realized with a
shock: 3:07pm, of course. Ten hours had gone by. He also realized
that he’d be imprisoned in the tiny dank space until ten more hours
went by and the underground shut down at 1:30am and the trains
stopped running. At a cadence of a train every three or four
minutes he’d be crushed trying to make it to the tunnel mouth and
the platform. Suppose midway between two niches he sprained his
ankle?

At the sudden thought that he’d miss the
midnight appointment, he struggled into his knapsack and slung the
ladder over his shoulder. He pulled the iron door open.

The noise of another train built up. In a
few seconds the twelve carriages thundered past. The concussion
made him stagger back. Sparks, squares of lighted windows stretched
out to a continuous line with quick blurs of seated passengers then
darkness again.

He started running, with high steps because
of the ties, and dangerously fast as though sucked forward by the
partial vacuum in the train’s wake. Three times he had to seek
refuge in niches. There was no getting used to it. Each time he was
certain that he would be pulled under the wheels.

It seemed hours before he managed to emerge
from the black tunnel mouth, heave knapsack and ladder onto the
Crossroad platform and hoist himself frantically after them before
the astonished eyes of three passengers. He hadn’t worked this part
of the station. Wasn’t it possible that Theo had made some sign of
assent beneath one of the messages?

He took the escalator up to the next level
and at the sight of a blue-neoned food stand was seized by ravenous
hunger. His mouth was blotter-dry. He washed down two sandwiches
with two bottles of beer. There was a surprising number of
passengers for a Sunday. He reached a corridor he’d worked early
that morning.

The message and scandalous red icon had
vanished from the posters.

He turned left into another corridor.

They’d vanished there too.

Looking closely he saw the clumsy
brush-strokes of his operators. The posters had been corrected.

Something was wrong. Yesterday had been
Saturday and today was Sunday. There were no poster corrections
during the weekend. Now he thought of the unusual number of
passengers and his ravenous hunger.

He rose on an escalator to the nearest
newsstand and saw that the day marked on the newspapers was
Tuesday. He passed his hands over his bristly face. How could he
have slept two and a half days?

Like a blow came the realization that he’d
missed the appointment with Theo. He imagined the boy waiting for
him under the Great Clock. He heard in his mind the dead doctor’s
nagging voice about a brief window of opportunity. And he, the
director, had spoiled everything. Hadn’t come. Had not come! Teddy
had shown signs of upset.

He thought of his assistant. He hadn’t the
energy or the courage to phone her. He’d phone her when he found
Theo. Profoundly discouraged, he abandoned his idea of messages. He
reverted to the original search for posters with telltale white
squares. He did a stretch of Line 6 then switched to Line 12. He
was as certain of failure in his present quest as he’d been
confident of success when scrawling the messages.

But at 11:05pm, after no more than two hours
of search, the director located Theo with strange ease at the least
likely of small stations. The train slowed before a platform with
posters covered with squares of authentic perfection. Lorz’s
practiced gaze and fingertips judged the age of the corrections: a
half-hour. Theo could have gone on to another station and then
another line. But in the corridor there were more squares and
rectangles: done a bare quarter of an hour before.

Something was the matter with them. They’d
lost their perfection. Near the tunnel mouth, the last posters bore
lop-sided squares, revealing some of the flesh that was meant to be
covered. The squares were still wet. Basic White dribbled from them
to the edge of the platform. There were splashes of white on the
ballast below. Theo had taken the train tunnel to reach the next
station. Why? Why hadn’t he taken the train?

Everything was repeated as in a dream. It was
as though his ordeal in the other tunnels had been a rehearsal for
what lay before him now. He felt for the vial of pills in his
pocket and realized that he himself hadn’t taken them now for three
days. He let himself down, as once before, on the ballast. As
before, there were the initial blue bulbs in the gloom, the rails
feebly gleaming red from the caged lights further on, the ties and
crunch of the ballast underfoot, the niches and the trains
thundering past into silence, the chirping of the strange cannibal
crickets of the underground tunnels.

And finally an iron door like the other iron
door. He pushed it open. Again the weak but blinding light of a
caged bulb. Again a ventilator started up. This storeroom was
slightly larger than the other. Dust was everywhere. It looked
disused for decades. Again tools lay in a corner. They were rusted
and covered with thick spider-webs. On a cheap filthy table there
was an antique upright phone. Next to it was a heap of yellowed
newspapers dating back to the monarchy. Against the rear wall, on
either side of another iron door, were carefully stacked drums of
paint and chemicals, piles of brushes, erasers, spatulas, sponges,
cutters, scissors, paste-pots. Soiled faded blue work-clothes were
gathered into a pallet. There was the imprint of a body on it. The
iron door between the drums of paint was much smaller than the one
that gave on the tracks. He pulled it open. “Theo,” he whispered
into the square of pitch darkness. “Theo,” he said in a louder
voice. It echoed cavernously.

On a shelf there was an old broken briar
pipe and a box of kitchen matches wrapped in wax paper against the
damp. He struck one against the crudely daubed cement wall and it
sullenly burst into flame. It gave off a sulphurous stench. He
remembered the matches of his childhood, 3b on the scale of
punishment for playing with them. How long ago had they ceased
manufacturing such matches? He took the yellowed newspapers and
twisted them to torches with difficulty. The brittle paper
fragmented. He lit the first torch, stooped and advanced in the low
passageway almost in a squatting position. The atmosphere was
choking. The flame gutted and went out. He retreated back to the
storeroom, filled his lungs with air and returned, nursing the
flame. The flickering yellow light was absorbed by the dark massive
masonry. He transferred the guttering flame with care to the next
twisted paper.

At the end of the low passageway he came up
against another iron door. He pushed at it. It was locked. He
pushed harder and heard a rattle on the other side. He pictured the
padlock, devoured by rust. With dread he imagined it yielding to
his push, the door squealing open and he pitching forward into the
cleft that ran at a right angle to the big silent empty passageway
with the bare bulbs dangling from the vaulted ceiling of the
subterranean maze of Old Hospital where he’d once been, seeking
Theo as now.

The flame went out. He backed precipitously
away from the locked door into the storeroom again. He closed the
first iron door between the drums of paint and sat with his back
against it. He mastered the urge to flee the storeroom and what was
behind his back. Theo would be returning any minute.

He clasped his knees and let his head fall
on his chest. The posters he’d worked over arose in confusion in
his mind: smiling faces, chateaux, geometric gardens, warmly lit
interiors, herds of cows, glazed green pottery, greetings at open
doors. They were all situated and circumscribed by the dirty white
tiles. Now he saw the farmhouse she’d sketched in her diary, free
of tiles and startlingly real: the kitchen garden, the orchard, the
forest with three peaks behind it.

Once the iron door that gave on the tracks
rattled fiercely above the deafening roar of a passing train. Once
the old fashioned phone on the table rang on and on urgently. He
didn’t move.