Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow

“It’s good to go somewhere that’s forbidden. Gives us a bit of peace and quiet. We keep to the main platform, put up barriers by the tunnels to keep the Specters at bay. I’ve seen them, hanging back, just beyond the light.” Flo stooped, picked up her lantern; her teeth and eyes shone in its gleam. “They say the train’s still down there, lost in the endless dark. And it’s not just the original dead who sit on it now, but newer passengers, too—modern victims of the marauding ghosts.”

Lockwood frowned. “You don’t believe that.”

“Not for me to say if it’s true or not.” Flo took up her bag, swung it over her shoulder. “I just make sure I don’t go past the iron lines. Come on, enough chin-rattling. The market’s started, and we need to get to it.”

With that, she led us out into the night.

The original entrance to Vauxhall Underground Station was very close, its gates chained and boarded up, its steps choked with litter. On nearby walls, old DEPRAC warning signs were still barely visible beneath years of ghost-cult posters. Flo ignored it all; we walked half a block south down a narrow, unpromising lane between empty office buildings, until we reached a junction, where we stopped.

“This is where I leave you,” Flo said. “I’m going on ahead. Give me five minutes, then you can follow. You take a left here, walk thirty yards, then left again down the lane. You’ll see the sentries up ahead. Show them the stuff and they should let you in, you’re that ugly. But here’s the deal: once you’re below, I won’t recognize you, I won’t help you. If you get caught and they beat you to death with sticks, I’ll stand by and won’t lift a finger.” She gazed at me with her bright blue eyes. “Just so you know.”

“Agreed and understood,” Lockwood said. “Hope you get a good price for…what is in your sack, Flo?”

“That’d be telling. Five minutes. Try not to get yourselves killed.”

After she’d gone, we took up positions against the wall—something midway between a loiter and a lurk—and waited. Five minutes ticked by; during this another relic-man—tall, ragged, and stooped like a grieving heron—slipped down the side road after Flo. We gave him an extra minute to get clear, then shuffled after him.

Down to the left. Thirty yards, then left again. It was more of an alley than a lane, dark as a cleft in the earth. Except at the end, where a naked bulb hung from a spindle above a metal door. In its cone of light, two very large gentlemen in long black coats stood like pillars, with a small ragged child between them.

The men were there to break your bones, but the child was the key— she was the Sensitive who vetted the objects being brought to the meeting. The ragged relic-man was in the process of showing her the contents of his bag. At either side, her henchmen waited for her decision. The bigger of the two held a stout black stick, which he patted occasionally into his cupped palm. He never spoke; he was the threat, the dealer of pain. The other was the talker who did all necessary interrogation. One spoke, one tapped his club. It was a fair bet that neither could manage both at the same time.

The relic-man passed muster. He closed his bag, pushed open the door, and disappeared inside. The men looked up at us. We approached casually down the alley.

Lockwood spoke through the side of his mouth. “Be calm. I’ll handle this, Luce.”

Something in the jaunty way he spoke alarmed me. Again I remembered what George had told me, how Lockwood’s recklessness was escalating all the time. I felt a twinge of guilt. Tonight, for selfish reasons, I was depending on his willingness to take risks. Without me, he wouldn’t have been here. I could feel the thrill of danger radiating from him now—intoxicating, but also scary. And we didn’t have our swords. “Be careful,” I said. “And also polite.”

“Of course.”

Lockwood’s tall, but the top of his head didn’t quite reach the shoulders of either sentry. He came to a halt before the child Sensitive, hands ready on his satchel.

The smaller henchman, the talker, pointed a meaty finger. “Show them.”

We both opened our bags. The kid looked in. She was no older than eight, a fragile little thing, with blue veins on her forehead under translucent skin.

I held up my spirit-cape by a corner, so its iridescent beauty was clear.

Talker’s frown deepened. Stick-Tapper stretched out his club and poked it against the feathers.

“Where’d you get these?” Talker said.

Lockwood pushed the club away. “Stole ’em, smelly. What’s it to you?”

To be fair, Lockwood’s accent did make him sound like an authentic relic-man. Trouble was, he was trying to be authentically insulting, too. At once Stick-Tapper swung the club around. It pressed hard against the underside of Lockwood’s chin.

“You want Joe to flick that up?” Talker said. “He does, and it takes your head clean off. He does it well , your head lands back on your neck stump upside-down.”

“Sounds like quite a show,” Lockwood said. “But these here in our bags are foreign marvels. Adelaide Winkman will want to see them.”

“We kill you, we take them to her ourselves,” Talker said, and I couldn’t help feeling there was a queasy logic to what he said. But the little child had put her hand on Stick-Tapper’s wrist and was shaking her head.

“No, this is real good,” she said. “She’d want it, like he says. Let them through.”

Her word was law. At once the stick was withdrawn and the men moved back. With a cocksure flick of the arm, Lockwood pushed at the door.

“Hold it.” Talker gestured at the daggers in our belts. “No weapons.”

“Call these toothpicks weapons?” Lockwood gave a snort. “You must be joking.”

Talker chuckled. “I’ll show you whether I’m joking.”

Thirty seconds later we’d been roughly frisked, relieved of our daggers, and kicked efficiently onward through the door.

“Do you have to be so rude?” I hissed, when we were alone. “You’re drawing attention to us.”

“Oh, relic-men are famously obnoxious. It’ll make us fit right in.”

“Yeah. Our broken corpses will fit in nicely, too.”

Beyond the door was an empty room with rough, bare concrete walls. At the far end, a circular hole with a metal rim led straight down into the earth. The hole was dark, but the top of a ladder projected from it, and there was a grainy suggestion of a light far below.

“Old access shaft to the Underground,” Lockwood said. “Guessed it would be something like that. It won’t make getting out too easy, but what can we do? You first, Luce, or me?”

I went first; I didn’t want him to get into an argument with a sewer rat or anything.

The ladder descended into the earth for a long distance, so much so that my hands went numb and I lost count of the number of rungs. It was very dark, and another unpleasant aspect of the experience was the sound that came rushing up the shaft: a roaring and a gusting of air, and what I thought were voices screaming. The noise seemed to come from far away, and (I guessed) from long ago; when I dropped down at last into a candlelit tunnel, all trace of it had died away. It was a different hubbub that surrounded me now, here on the forgotten platforms of Vauxhall Underground Station.

In layout, it was no different from countless other Tube stations still in daily use. Opposite the nook in which the ladder emerged, three rusting escalators rose into the shadows—silent, solid, their steps clogged with black dust. Lines of faded posters flanked them. That was the old way out, to the now sealed up ticket halls.

Down below was where the action was tonight. I was in a central space with three squared arches on either side. These led to the north/south platforms of the old Victoria Line. The curved walls still had their original white ceramic tiles, but in many places these had been levered off, and a shallow hole gouged out. Candles burned in these alcoves, their smoke weaving woozily against the ceilings, where old lamps hung like black, fat-bodied spiders. Everything shimmered with a soft and avaricious golden light: the tiles, the escalators, the black-garbed relic-men and women all around.