James Herbert - ‘48

‘What are you talking about?’ Muriel was shaking her head, too tired to understand.

I picked myself up and walked over to them, explaining as I went ‘He dumped the dead bodies from this place outside the back door. I wondered what was missing from inside the shelter.’

‘I had to, you can understand that,’ said Potter, appealing to me. ‘I had to make this place fit enough to live in.’

‘Listen, you did right,’ I reassured him. ‘And nothing could be worse than what we found inside the Underground station.’

‘At least there were no flies,’ he said as if it made a difference. ‘The bodies just rotted away, like. No maggots and not much stink after the first few weeks.’

Yeah, no flies and no maggots. In fact, hardly any insects at all. I suppose we had to at least be grateful for that small mercy. God knows what kind of diseases could’ve wiped out the rest of us in the aftermath.

Distant rumbling from beyond the iron door and dust drifting down from the stairway’s slanted ceiling got us moving again. Potter went first, lighting the way, and Cissie and Muriel followed close behind. I guess both were eager for that sunlight The German, who’d remained on one knee, stood erect, the motion almost fluid, as if his steam had already been restored. I let him go on ahead of me – enemy at my back, and all that – then got going myself. Something heavy slammed against the door behind us, but none of us bothered to look back.

Christ, it hurt to climb those stairs – every muscle in my body was now stiffening up – and I favoured my injured leg, using the rough wall to lean on. My shoulder didn’t bother me that much but the rest of my arm felt like a lump of lead. Nothing was broken though, I was sure of that, so considering the punishment I’d taken that morning, I figured I’d gotten off lightly. If these strangers hadn’t picked me up in the square when they did I’d’ve been not just dead, but dried meat, by now. And if the old guy, Albert Potter, hadn’t rescued us from the burning tunnel, we’d all be cooked meat – yeah, choked, smoked and goddamn coked.

At the top of the stairs Potter was dipping into his overalls pocket, the others squeezed up behind him, so I waited further down, rubbing some life back into my arm. I heard a clink as he drew out a large metal ring, at least a dozen keys attached to it. The one he chose unlocked the door immediately and he pulled it inwards so that a gust of air rushed through. He disappeared outside and I wondered why it was still dark up there. I soon knew the answer.

The almost pitch-black place we stepped out into was bigger, much bigger, than the Tube tunnels further below, and huge, monolithic shapes loomed over us in the gloom. When the light from Potter’s paraffin lamp fell on the nearest one, I realized those shapes were passenger vehicles, tramcars that ran on embedded iron tracks with electric cables overhead supplying the power, and the hangar-like place we’d escaped into was a large tunnel, a kind of under-passage beneath the city streets. It occurred to me as we stood there that those trams would be full of withered corpses.

There were hints of daylight coming from what must have been overhead airshafts along the tunnel’s length and at the far end we could just make out a greyish hue that might have been the sloped entrance/exit. As our eyes grew accustomed to this new level of darkness we began to discern other forms lying in the roadway and across the sunken tracks, small black mounds, hundreds of them, and we were aware that they could only be the remnants of those who’d perished down here. Many, we assumed, were the remains of Civil Defence workers, laid there by Potter, himself.

Stern and the two girls lingered in the oasis of light, as if frozen there, afraid to move on. One of the girls – Muriel, I think, began to weep. What lay around us was no more horrific than anything we’d found inside the Underground station and tunnels – far less so, in fact – but the quietness of the place must have stirred something deep within them – sorrow, dread, an interweaving oppression of emotions – that held them there, shocked and grief-stricken. I guess the fact that they suddenly had time to reflect had a lot to do with their paralysis, but it was nothing new to me, nor to the old warden.

His gruff East End voice cut through the mood. ‘It’s as good a tomb as any,’ he said, no pity, no remorse, in his tone, only a sepulchral hollowness caused by the high walls and ceiling lending any reverence to his words. ‘I’ve said a prayer over ‘em,’ he went on, ‘which is more than most of the world’s dead ever got, I expect.’

‘Let’s just find our way out of here,’ said Muriel quietly, and the calmness in her voice surprised me. In the dim light I could see the glistening of tears on her cheeks.

Cissie, on the other hand, had channelled her sadness into anger. ‘Bloody well right! I can’t breathe down here!’ She looked towards the distant light and took a fierce step towards it, ready to march off in that direction. I caught her arm.

‘No. It’s too close to Holborn Station that way.’ I’d figured it out, finally got my bearings. The incline had to be the northern approach to the under-passage and I remembered how near that was to the station. ‘The Blackshirts could have left the entrance guarded, just in case we came out that way,’ I explained quickly as Cissie tried to pull herself free.

‘He is right,’ Stern agreed. ‘They will be waiting.’

Cissie ceased struggling and turned her head, looking in the other direction, towards a stifling blackness that seemed to go on forever. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said warily. ‘You’re not suggesting…’

‘There’s no choice,’ I told her, not for the first time. And when I followed her gaze towards that eerie inkiness, I knew the day’s nightmare wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

SO WE WALKED through that nightmare, keeping close together, a tight bunch, the lamplight defining the soft borders of our world, none of us caring to look beyond and none of us focusing on what lay within. The warden kept us to a narrow sidewalk and every now and again we had to step over rag bundles, clothes that had become shrouds. There were other doors set along the wall, but we weren’t curious about them, not even a little bit – we’d got to the stage when all curiosity was numbed and we were only interested in getting to the end of that goddamn tram tunnel. If Potter knew what lay beyond those doors, he wasn’t saying. As a matter of fact, he’d fallen into a sulky silence since we’d started off, his way of letting us know he wasn’t happy about our continued association. To tell the truth, he’d wanted to leave us right there outside the bunker door, deciding he’d done enough for us already and that he would go in the opposite direction, towards the light, Blackshirts or no Blackshirts. He’d easily sneak past ‘em, he assured us, but I wasn’t willing to take that chance. As far as the goons were concerned, we were either dead or still trapped down there in the Underground, and I didn’t want anybody persuading them otherwise. Potter might be gabby if he got caught and anyway, he was more useful leading us out of that place. The barrel of my Colt pressed against his plump belly won the day, and he figured it’d do no harm to stick with us a little longer.

We passed more trams with death cargoes and soon learned to avoid looking at the windows. It was weird though, because although we didn’t look at them, each one of us felt those corpses behind the glass were watching us. We felt like intruders in some private purgatory, a kind of halfway stage where the dead passengers waited for the current to be switched back on so they could continue their journey towards oblivion. Okay, so maybe now and again our eyes strayed towards skeletal arms hanging over the sides of open-top trams or eyeless skulls leering out at us, but mostly we fixed our gaze on the warden’s light, following the beacon like pilgrims following a cross.