50
He launched himself out of the darkness, hood up, leading with his fists. I was barely ready for him, almost side on, but instead of trying to cut me down, he went past me. My body had been prepared for the impact, ready to absorb the blow. Instead, I felt the dead air move, an arm brush mine, and then he was already on the stairs, heading up into the ticket hall above us.
A second later, I followed.
As I came out of the bend on the stairs, I saw him exit through the metal grille and head up the stairs to the line. I tried to close the gap but he was fast. Ex-army. Fit. At the stairs I slowed. Up ahead, it was a blind turn back on to the line, so I came up on the left-hand side to avoid being hit or surprised. But there was no one waiting.
The line was silent.
I took a couple of steps through the trees to where the old eastbound line met the station house. Nothing now. No sound. No movement. The ground was hard, dried and compact. I moved along it, the platform about five feet above me on the island, glass and dust and brick scattered all over it. Halfway down, I placed both hands on the island and hauled myself up. Next to me, the station creaked in the hot sun. I didn’t move. Just stood there and listened. No sound but the station house, baking in the heat.
Crack.
A sound from the other side.
Glass beneath boots.
I moved quickly around the front, watching where my feet fell, and stopped at the edge of the building. Then I peered around the corner, along the westbound side.
No one on the platform.
No one on the line.
I came out from behind the station house. About two hundred feet further along, the island became a ramp and dropped down to meet the path. Fifty feet beyond that, the trees began to close in, swallowing the old line whole. There was nothing now. No breeze at all. The only thing that came back were my footsteps, moving across the thin layer of glass and dust. As the island dropped down, the two lines merging into a single path, I saw a flash of movement up ahead.
I carried on, my feet returning to the grass of the line, weeds crawling through the cracks in the baked earth, masonry kicked off on to the old track from the island. There was so much of it – chunks of brick, shards of roofing, clumps of tile. One wrongly placed foot and my ankle would snap.
As the trees grew thicker and the shadows longer, there was a subtle change in the atmosphere: the foliage seemed to drop, as if reaching out, and another tunnel emerged, almost from nowhere, like it was part of the trees and grass; all but carved from them. It was as gun-barrel-straight as the last one, but it was even longer, the daylight at its end just a pinprick against a slate-black wall. I walked right up to it, stopping short of its entrance, but the closer I got, the more I started to sense something. Something defective and amiss. Places were shaped and moulded by their history, by the events that had taken place in them, but mostly they were shaped by the people who had passed through them.
I stepped inside and felt wet mud beneath my feet. The further in I got, the more the temperature seemed to drop. For a moment I felt adrift. My eyes hadn’t adjusted. The ground was uneven and shifting under my boots. I slowed slightly and, as I did, I heard something ahead of me, like footsteps softening, getting further away from me. Then there was no noise at all.
I stopped.
‘Duncan?’
My voice echoed along the tunnel and then vanished, as if absorbed by the dark. The daylight at the other end was about the size of a dinner plate, but it was below my eyeline, like I was heading down into the earth, rather than over it. I glanced back over my shoulder to where I’d come in: the entrance was about forty yards back, a circle full of trees, and hazy in the distance was the island and station house. I thought briefly about backtracking, about returning to the sunlight – because even after being inside the tunnel for thirty seconds, I could barely see anything; maybe ten feet in either direction.
Then another sound from in front of me.
I slowly stepped back, placing my foot as carefully as I could, and felt the heel of my boot disappear into soft mud. There was a gentle sucking sound, barely any noise at all, and yet – in the silence – it was like a scream. Suddenly, there was movement in front of me. As I stepped back again, caught mid-stride, he came out of the darkness, almost ripped from it, and – before I had a chance to react – I was being slammed against the ground, wind fizzing from my body, white spots flashing in front of my eyes.
A moment of confusion.
I started to get up, hand flat to the mud path.
And then a boot swung out of the dark, not even there until it was inches in front of my face, and as I tried desperately to avoid it, the steel toecap connected with the bridge of my nose – and I thumped back violently against the ground for a second time.
And this time I blacked out.
When I came round again, I was still in the same place. My head felt like it was on fire, pain in the bridge of my nose, in my forehead, around my eyes. I touched a finger to my face. My nose wasn’t broken, but I could feel wet blood all down my lips and over my chin.
Getting on to all fours and then slowly, unsteadily, to my feet, I headed back the way I’d come in, eventually hitting the light. It was starting to cool off now, or maybe I was just so coated in cold mud that it only felt that way. As I stood there, wiping the blood and the dirt from my skin, dizziness hit me and a wave of nausea swept through my system. I put a hand to my mouth, trying to push it down, and as I did I realized the smell of the staffroom was still clinging to the inside of my throat, to my mouth and nose.
A second wave hit me – and this time I was sick.
When I was done, I wiped my mouth and looked back into the darkness of the tunnel. Pell. If he’d been using the staffroom, he’d been using it for something bad. The room may have been empty, but the smell of death remained, and so did the evidence of suffering. He knew the line. He knew how to navigate it, how to keep its secrets from people, how to use it against me. And he’d be long gone by now.
But even as I realized that, even as I saw the logic in it, a weird feeling passed over me.
Like someone was still watching.
Pell hadn’t returned to his house, although I hadn’t expected him to. I walked down his driveway to the tap and turned it on, washing my face with the lukewarm water. I rinsed off the mud, leaving great big wet patches on my jeans, and then I took off my T-shirt and turned it inside out. It masked some of the bloodstains; enough, at least, not to turn heads on the train ride home. Then, finally, I scrubbed down my boots. When I was done, I turned the tap off and stood there, watching the water run into the gaps between the patio slabs. But even washed down, I could still smell the room on me.
The blood and the death.
In my clothes, in the thread and the stitching.
In my skin.