Саймон Морден - Down Station

With that, he stepped over into the sea. The water closed around his ankles, lapped up his shins. He bent over to steady himself, one hand against the wet, barnacled boulder, and took another step. His foot slipped slightly, and he had to use both hands to stay upright. When he glanced back, he was smiling, his teeth white against his soot-streaked skin.

The roaring from inside the station was too loud to ignore now. It sounded like an oncoming train, but overwhelming and inexorable. Everything was shaking, and this, surely, was the end. The stray, the Chinese-looking woman who’d joined them in the tunnels, didn’t hesitate. She jumped out and over, and didn’t look back.

‘Up, Mama, up!’ Mary dipped down and dragged at Mama’s arms. ‘Everybody up.’

Mama responded slowly, uncertainly, and Mary rounded on the man in the turban. ‘You. You’ve got to help.’

He did. He got behind Mama, pushed her towards the open door. Behind him, the red glow started to build.

‘Hurry. Out. Out.’ He reached out for the other two women and they climbed up him, almost pulling him over in the process.

Mama was still in the doorway, blocking it, feet against the jamb, hands braced against the uprights. Mary wasn’t gentle. She put her hand in Mama’s back and heaved her into the sea, letting the others jump past her and pick her up.

Then it was her and the turbaned man◦– boy, he was just a kid, like her◦– facing each other across the width of the open door.

‘This. This is fucking nuts, right?’

‘Where are we?’ His brown eyes were wide and wild, struggling to take any of the impossible view in.

‘We’re in London.’ She looked over her shoulder. The narrow door that led from the staircase to the corridor creaked, and jets of flame bored through the gaps. She watched Mama struggle and wail as a wave caught her full on, and heard the others shriek at the cold. She put one foot into the sea, felt the water rise up, fill her boot. The rest of her was burning. There was no choice, really. ‘And now we’re not.’

She pulled on the door, ready to swing it back shut, and the boy, already wet to his waist, jumped in again to help her wrestle it home. Neither of them gave any thought as to what the door might be attached to.

There was an order to it. The bar inside had to be raised again and the metal latch caught before it would close. They got it wrong the first time, and the second time too until the boy held the door to reach up and set the mechanism up right.

The corridor was on fire. Mary heaved as hard as she could, and felt the bolts catch. She staggered back, and caught her first sight of the façade of a glazed red-brick tube station entrance embedded in a lone stack of rock, the endless ocean behind it.

She fell on her backside. The sea rushed in quickly, so that it didn’t matter how nimble she was at standing again. The moving water dragged at her, and she had to hold on to the black boulder, studded with sharp white shells, to stop herself from being swept away.

She looked up again at the lintel, where the weathered letters were picked out in cream: Down Street. Above that was the hint of an arch, where it seemed to merge into the natural rock. The door was still there, surrounded by bricks. Painted grey, with a blue sign fixed to it.

Even as she read the writing on it, it faded and grew more indistinct. Now she couldn’t tell if there had been a door or not, whether the bricks were simply jointing in the rock, whether the letters over the door were just a trick of the light.

Then it was gone. No more than a slab of wet rock, imprinted with a vague impression of a door. If the light changed, or she looked away, even that would be lost.

A string of orange boilersuited figures stretched from the lone stack in the sea, along the half-covered blocks, to the rocky foreshore.

The boy’s turban was deep blue, dirty and scorched in places, wet with spray. He had a sort-of beard, one she’d mistaken for soot stains. He was staring back at the place the door had been, and he, like her, couldn’t quite believe anything anymore.

‘Are we dead?’ he asked her, even as the water washed up his back and made him shiver. ‘We should be dead, right?’

A wave caught her, making her body rise and she lost her grip. As she scrabbled at the rough rock for another handhold, she grazed her palm on a jagged edge, and her skin split. Blood bloomed in red beads along the cut, and when she was able to get her feet down again and brace herself against the pull of the sea, she inspected the damage.

It wasn’t deep, but the salt water stung. She turned her hand palm out as evidence.

‘You might be dead. I’m not.’

The first of them, the man the boy had arrived with, had reached the shore, and was climbing out of the surf. The others straggled behind him. Mary wiped her hand on her thigh and started after them, clambering over the rocks when the waves went down, stopping and holding on when they came up again and tried to wash her off.

She’d gone only a little way when she looked back. The turbaned kid hadn’t moved, still fixated on the blank slab they’d all emerged from. He reached out and put his hand against it, pushing at it and seeing if it was real.

‘Leave it,’ she called. ‘Leave it, okay?’

‘Where are we?’ he shouted back at her, repeating his earlier question. ‘Where?’

‘We’re not being burnt to death in some disused station corridor, that’s where.’ She turned her face to avoid a direct hit from a wave. ‘Did you want to stay there?’

‘No.’ He didn’t sound certain.

‘Then get your fucking arse in gear and get moving. The water’s getting higher and I’m not fucking drowning for you.’ She couldn’t swim. Float maybe, but not swim. If she got swept away, that’d be that, and it wouldn’t matter that she’d escaped the heat of the Underground that had claimed almost everyone else. So she moved faster, took more risks, received more knocks and scrapes, got everything wet.

And she was certain that she was still alive, that she wasn’t some hollowed-out twisted skeleton cooked so hard her bones had split open to the marrow. No, that wasn’t her. She was up to her belly button in water so cold she was losing the sense of feeling in her toes, climbing towards the shore along a line of rocks sharp enough to cut her.

Like the kid, she had no idea where she was, but unlike him, she didn’t much mind that she hadn’t gone the way of all the others. She’d survived, because that was what she was good at. She moved on, hand over hand. She was right about the rising height of the water. The line of rocks was disappearing, the waves topping them more and more regularly, covering them for longer, leaving her less time to make progress.

She made it. She reached a point where a strong hand came down and helped her up the last part, and on to a rock that wasn’t swamped with every wave. She climbed higher, well out of the wash, and finally got to sit with her back to the cliff. She was exhausted.

The kid struggled on. He’d almost left it too late, and the sea closed over his turban a couple of times. He re-emerged, spluttering and gasping, shaking the water from his eyes and resighting where he was heading.

Finally, he was up. The older man reached for him like he had her, and he all but fell as he was dragged over the lip of the last rock.

They exchanged a word or two, and the kid climbed further up away from the sea.

Behind them, the line of rocks submerged completely, white foam the only sign of where they’d been. The stack in the distance was now an island, the waves surging around it.

The sun came out from behind one of the quickly moving clouds, bright and strong, and the gull swooped down from the headland in a flash of grey, heading out towards the horizon.