Tim Weaver - Vanished

His eyes flicked across my shoulder, along the platform towards the other end. I followed his gaze. The night lights were on but they barely seemed to make a difference. I turned back to O’Keefe, his eyes on the opposite tunnel. At the surface, when he’d first been introduced to us, he mentioned that he’d been a patrolman for twenty years, that he’d walked deep-level stations on the Northern and Central lines, and yet – as we stood on the platform – it was like this was his first time down here.

‘Stevie?’

He glanced at me.

‘You sure you’re okay?’

His eyes came to rest on the right-hand tunnel, close to where he’d found Drake’s phone. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, his voice more even now.

I glanced at Healy and gestured for him not to say anything. ‘Stevie, I need to know what’s going on.’

He ripped his eyes away from the tunnel. ‘Huh?’

‘Is something bothering you?’

‘No.’

‘What happened when you found the phone?’

He looked between us, then back to the tunnel. Healy rolled his eyes at me, out of sight of O’Keefe.

‘It was just …’

‘What?’

He glanced at me again. ‘Normally there’s work going on in most of the stations,’ he said, the torch at his side. ‘ “Engineering hours” and all that; when the trains aren’t in service. Between one and five in the morning, there’s staff all along the line, all through the night, people repairing, cleaning, making sure everything’s okay. They were down here all last week when I came through, but when I found that phone on Thursday night, there was no one. There was no scheduled work.’ He paused and looked at me, his face half lit by the lamps above us on the platform. ‘It was just so quiet, and kind of …’

He trailed off and turned back to face the tunnel.

‘Kind of what?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been doing this twenty years,’ O’Keefe said, his fingers tapping out a nervy rhythm on the flashlight, ‘but that night I found the phone, it felt different.’

‘Different?’

Healy’s eyes narrowed. Suddenly he was interested again.

‘We get tons of lost property down here,’ O’Keefe said. ‘People drop all sorts of things and don’t realize. But that phone … it was like it had been placed there.’

‘Like someone had put it there deliberately?’

He didn’t reply.

‘Stevie?’

‘Yeah, like someone had put it there.’

‘Where was it exactly?’

We moved towards the end of the platform, level with the last plastic screen on our left. On our right, attached to the wall, was a white bench. ‘It was on there,’ he said, pointing to the bench. ‘Just placed on top.’

‘Could have fallen out of someone’s pocket.’

‘Could have,’ O’Keefe said, but he didn’t sound convinced, and I could see why: the benches, dotted from one end of the platform to the other, were almost oval-shaped, built for leaning against. If a phone dropped out of someone’s pocket by accident, the angle of the bench wouldn’t stop its fall. It would bounce right off and hit the floor.

‘Did you see anyone else in here that night?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

I turned to Healy. ‘Are the Met checking CCTV?’

‘We’ve put in a request for the footage,’ he said, and then stepped towards O’Keefe. ‘Can we get down on to the line?’

O’Keefe jolted, like he’d suddenly been pulled from a dream, and brought a set of keys away from his belt. He selected the one he wanted, manually unlocked one of the screens and backed away. As if he doesn’t want to go first . Both of us noted it, Healy glancing at me, before we dropped through the space and down on to the line. O’Keefe followed, more hesitancy in his stride, and as soon as his feet landed on the blackened concrete of the line, he stood there frozen, just staring into the tunnel. Something in him had been knocked out of kilter. He was a brassy, confident kind of guy – I could read that in him, right from the off – but he was showing none of that now.

‘So what felt different about Thursday night?’ I asked again.

O’Keefe paused, as if unsure how to articulate himself. The only sound, the only movement, was his fingers on the torch. After a while he looked at me, his face framed by the light from the platform. ‘It was like you could feel something bad down here.’

58

The tunnel was about thirty feet across and about the same high, or maybe it just looked that way. It was hard to tell for sure. There were no lights on anywhere in front of us, except for a faint glow on one of the walls further down – perhaps a quarter of a mile on – which I assumed was from the platform at Waterloo, out of sight beyond the curve of the tunnel. Every so often we’d pass a red light on the left-hand side, a marker next to it, but the lights weren’t built to illuminate, just to be seen. Once we’d passed them, they returned to the dark, as if swallowed whole by it.

After about five hundred feet, against the continual silence, I started to hear the very faint sound of dripping water. We were passing right under the Thames, and through some small space, some crack somewhere, a trace of it had found its way down.

O’Keefe swept his torch along the wall closest to us, picking out endless brickwork and thick electrical cabling, braided together like lengths of hair. Healy shone his torch off in the other direction, to the fixings and markers, and as our lights framed the wall, I saw a space, about six feet across, with a metal grille pulled across it. It looked like it led through to an adjacent tunnel. I stepped closer and as I did O’Keefe directed his flashlight at it.

‘The Last Walk,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘That’s what they call it.’

‘Where does it go?’

‘Runs all the way under the river.’

Healy moved in alongside me.

‘People still use it?’ I asked.

‘No. It hasn’t been used for years. They closed it off when they put the deep-level line in here. Before that, it was used as a transportation tunnel, bringing things in under the river and over to the other side.’ He paused, eyes fixed on the grille. ‘And before that, right back at the start, it was used to take bodies to the morgue at St Thomas’ Hospital.’

‘The Last Walk,’ Healy said quietly.

O’Keefe looked at me. ‘A lot of people reckon the old stations in east London are the ones with the ghosts. But this place …’ He stopped again. There was no humour in his face, not a hint of amusement or self-deprecation. ‘It’s got a feel.’

Healy smirked, reacting in the same way I would have done if I hadn’t have seen O’Keefe’s face. But once O’Keefe turned to look at him, Healy’s smile dissolved and we all stood there, those last words echoing along the blackness of the tunnel.

‘Can I borrow your torch?’ I said to O’Keefe. He handed it to me and, as I moved across the tracks, stepping over the lines, I shone the flashlight through the grille to the space on the other side. The mix of light and shadows created patterns in the darkness of the foot tunnel, drifting across its walls, but it was only when I was standing right on top of the grille, looking through it, that I could see it was ajar.

I called Healy over and, as he approached, I pushed at the metal grille. It shifted slightly – juddering like a door stuck in its frame – and then squeaked backwards.

‘Is this supposed to be open?’ I said to O’Keefe.

‘No,’ he said, barely audible, from behind me. There was alarm in his voice and, when I remembered what he’d told us earlier, I realized why: every step we’d taken into the tunnel, every noise we’d heard, every entrance that was supposed to be closed, had further confirmed his uneasiness. It was like you could feel something bad down here.