The one positive aspect of the experience was that I’d completely stopped thinking about the place being halfway into the void. Likely that’s why Yancy was able to take us onward. She took us out through the back of the canopy, lifting apart two massive brocade drapes, and we ducked through behind her and were at the top of a narrow concrete stairway going down to a cramped tunnel made of bricks.
We had to go single file. Dim caged lamps on the ceiling flickered to life only as Yancy stepped beneath them, and went out again right on my heels, so we were traveling in a small island of mud-yellow light that left everything stained the color of old sepia photographs, matte and papery, and all around us a pitch dark that was just barely not the void. As if we were somehow calling each chunk of the space into existence only long enough to get through it, like getting a reference text out of the void that you only needed for a single essay and throwing it back afterwards. It didn’t make any sense even with magic; it was the idea that you could climb up into the sky by taking a ladder rung from below you and putting it above you, stepping onto it, and then grabbing the rung you’d just left, putting it up above the other one, with the ground getting left further and further behind—it was just silly, a cartoon joke to laugh at, not something to believe in. It was almost impossible to think of it as a space that really existed outside of us, and under normal circumstances, probably I’d have thought about that too much, and then I’d have been one of those people who never came back out again.
But I wasn’t thinking about how the passage was one step up from the void and how likely it was to tip off. I wasn’t even carefully trying to not think that. Instead I was thinking the opposite: how it was so much more real than it ought to have been, how it did exist, and about how I needed Yancy to stop long enough that I could grab her by the arms and shake her until the answers came out that I needed, the answers that I knew I didn’t want, and I didn’t want them with so much sickening intensity that the passage actually started to get longer around us, lights flickering on further up ahead, a plink-plink dripping sound starting, and a breath of musty air moved in our faces.
An unreadable poster loomed out of the dark, smeared by damp, and Yancy abruptly turned, opened a door I hadn’t noticed in the wall, and swung out through it very quick, almost a dancing movement; the instant Liesel and I were out, she shut the door hard behind us and wheeled round with her arms spread to gather the two of us up on either side, and she hustled us away as fast as she possibly could, through another short narrow unlit tunnel and up three steps in a rush. I expect she was trying to keep us from noticing that the door—possibly the tunnel itself—wasn’t really there anymore behind us. She had us out of the space before we even had a chance to register where we were, squinting painfully against fluorescent lights that had come on in an unpleasant buzzing glare: a wide tunnel with a roof like someone had made a waffle out of steel girders, one of the old air-raid shelters in the Underground.
This must have been one of the emergency back doors the enclave had opened during the Blitz: sensible of them to have one leading to the deep underground shelters. They’d probably quietly dug themselves that small narrow side tunnel when the authorities weren’t looking, and then blocked it up again after the war. There was still just a hint of something vaguely soft about the place, just like that crumbling ruin of a mansion that Alfie had taken us through. The enclave had closed up the old exit, to save themselves the trouble of guarding it, but I would have laid money they had somehow bought or rented out this place and were now using most of the room inside the enclave. It would certainly have cost less than expensive architectural monstrosities in primo London postcodes.
But the shelter itself was still a real place in the world, inexpressibly comforting. The sickening quivery feeling beneath my feet was gone so completely I only just now managed to register how horrible it had been, feeling it all this time. The tunnel was filled with identical old bunk bed frames stretching the whole length, stacked with handwritten-labeled boxes full of aggressively boring things like ancient videotapes and sewer planning surveys from the 1980s and proceedings of subcommittees with long acronyms. I went straight for the nearest one and put my hands on the cold clammy metal and then put my cheek against it too, taking deep gulping breaths full of rust and mildew and mold and dust and tar and oil and paint and dirt, a cocktail of underground stinks, and when the walls and floor shuddered with a train going by somewhere on the other side, noisy and cranky and tooth-rattling, I shuddered with almost delirious relief. My whole brain devoured every wonderful reasonable predictable sensation. I could with pleasure have spread myself out over the dirty concrete floor and possibly licked it.
“Here, have one,” Yancy said. I lifted my head. Liesel had sat down on the floor herself and was leaning back against the opposite wall with her eyes shut. Yancy was unwrapping a packet of small square wafer biscuits. She pulled one out and crunched into it, and handed the packet to me: they smelled of lemon and vanilla.
“What’s this?” I said, feeling what I think was reasonably wary.
“A biscuit,” Yancy said, with a snort of laughter. “Go on. It’ll settle your stomach.” Liesel lurched up to get one herself. They were real too, plain ordinary sugar and flour and artificial flavorings that were absolutely natural by comparison; we reduced the whole packet to crumbs in a few minutes. Better than licking rusty cabinets.
Yancy watched us devour the biscuits. I hadn’t quite finished gobbling when she said, a little airy, “Well, that was interesting. That tunnel’s usually an hour’s walk with people who all know the way. Mind telling me how you did it?”
The sweet powdery wafer dust on my tongue had a faint aftertaste. I was a Scholomance graduate, so my brain had both noticed it and already classified it as not going to kill you, which meant it was safe enough to eat in desperation, and I had been as desperate for it as I’d ever been for a slice of stale toast with only one spot of mold or a brown apple slice or a bowl of noodles fished out from one end of a pan with a miasmic wriggler on the other. So I hadn’t stopped eating, but now that the biscuits were down, I knew there had been something on them, nothing really nasty but a quiet little nudge that would only last a few minutes at most: go on, tell old Yancy what she wants to know.
Knowing that you’ve been enchanted doesn’t stop it working, necessarily, but in this case Yancy had asked me a really unfortunate question, because it dragged me straight out of the overwhelming physical relief of being in the real world and smashed me back into the reason why I’d been able to get out: the questions I didn’t want to ask and had to ask. “It was there!” I said, my voice fraying like rotting cloth. “The enclave shoved those places off into the void, but they were there. Why aren’t they gone?”
Yancy spread her arms, smiling. She wasn’t even lying, really; she was just saying sorry, not telling you my most valuable secrets. “How should I know? I know they’re there, that’s good enough for me.”