Pandaemonium (7 page)

Or maybe I only wanted to believe him better than he was, maybe I needed that. If so, it still wouldn’t do him any harm to be good for a while. He might even develop a taste for it.

Anyway. I was committed now; I had committed him, and he was willing at least to play along. That was good enough for now.

And here was our stop, and I was up and hauling him to his feet before either one of us was prepared for it. Something to thank the Corbies for, perhaps. An hour ago we could hardly bear to look at each other, and now I was being casually physical with him, making free of his body the way I used to do. Back when I had licence and authority, when I was official: when
Jacey’s girlfriend
meant me and defined me entirely.

“Chancery Lane? What’s here?”

“Nothing. We’re just changing trains,” and I was just leaving my arm tucked through his for my comfort, or for better control of him, or...

“No, wait.” We were still in the doorway of the train, and he was glancing at the map above, frowning. “There are no connections at this stop. We can’t change here, unless we’re going back again...”

“Jacey. Trust me.”
You said you’d be good. That means don’t be too smart, don’t think too hard.
I tugged him onto the platform, and he did come, but he still had that not-very-trusting look on his face. The Fay in me wanted to smooth it away with my fingers, or try kisses if that didn’t work, if fingers just weren’t enough to cut it. Poor Fay. The Desi in me was scowling at her, blaming her for something else entirely that was not her fault at all. If Jacey used one thing to avoid thinking about something else – if he tried to drown the small voice of his conscience with excess and indulgence, if he ran with the fast crowd because he didn’t want to sit still and actually think – he wasn’t the only one who did that. Right now I was using my own fear of his notorious family to avoid thinking about what I’d done this morning, what it meant to Jordan, what it meant to me.

Using one boy and his dangerous parents to avoid thinking about another one, and his.

Urgency let me get away with it, if only just. I could almost be grateful to the Corbies. An adrenalin spurt, an Aspect lock-down, that fight-or-flight tunnel vision was just what I needed...

Tunnel vision. Hah. Sharp enough to cut myself, if I only dared to laugh.

He tried to go one way, following the flow of people; I held still until he stopped pulling, then drew him with me in the opposite direction.

“The signs say exit that way,” he murmured. Not a protest this time, he was catching on; but he never did like being disoriented. Off his beat, out of his depth: he was hating this. And he thought there was humiliation coming, and he was barefoot and defenceless, and he’d hate that worse, he thought.

I thought he was probably right.

“Yeah. We don’t want the exit. I told you, we’re just changing trains.”

Down to the end of the platform, and here was a passage with no signs and no advertisements, just one bare flickering fluorescent light bouncing off the grimy tiling. Puddles on the cracked concrete floor, that looked and smelled suspiciously just like exactly what they were.

“Oh, great. Now I have to wade through a toilet?”

“Hush, and come on...” And
yes, you do.
Poor Jacey. He was learning fast, but he really wasn’t used to this. At least he wasn’t trying to pull back, though; he grumbled, but he didn’t resist. Most likely he still thought he was protecting me, and he hadn’t changed his mind – yet – about whether I was worth it.

The low arched roof of the passage closed over our heads, that juddering light embraced us. We plotted a course that kept his feet more or less dry, though it meant skipping and weaving from one side to the other; then the passage turned a corner, and here was a very solid gate of iron bars, very firmly locked against us.

“Well, then.” He was very ready to give up, even though it meant another skip around the puddles. “I don’t know where you thought you were taking us, Desi, but you can’t get there from here.”

I just looked at him. “Got your card?”

These two I carry are not the regular kind that you can pick up at a station or order down the phone. These you can only find online, at an address that Google doesn’t know. Registration is complex and can prove expensive, sometimes in other ways than money. But sometimes – well, sometimes you just have to see a friend to safety. Or take yourself there, suddenly and without warning.

The lock on the gate was in a big old-fashioned cast iron case, with a keyhole hiding behind a brass escutcheon. It looked deliberately unfriendly, disinclined to open under any circumstances, key or no key.

No key needed. I said, “One at a time now. Do what I do.”

What I did was swipe my card down between the lock and the jamb, as if it were a credit-card reader.

There was a brief pause, then a heavy
clunk,
and the gate swung marginally open. I heaved it wider and slithered through; it closed firmly in poor Jacey’s face.

“Now you. Swipe and go.”

He blinked at me through the bars, then obediently swiped. The gate unlocked; I pulled it open and beckoned him through. It slammed shut at his back, more violently than any spring could close it, or any human hand.

Jacey blinked again. I wanted to muss his hair and kiss him and call him a good boy just to make his eyes snap with temper, just to call him back into himself; it was disturbing, seeing him so uncertain and out of place. Good for him, perhaps, but not so good for me just now.

He said, “Why couldn’t we both come through together?”

“Two people on one card? Can’t be done.” It couldn’t be done upstairs, at the regular barriers with the regular cards; it certainly couldn’t be done down here. “You don’t imagine the lock is the only safeguard on that gate, do you?”

He shrugged. “I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t know what the gate is protecting.”

“No. I’m sorry, Jacey. I’m not keeping you deliberately in the dark.” Though of course I was – or at least in the flicker of an unreliable light, giving him only flashes of insight. “You’re used to the mundane world and the Overworld, and this is something else. This is the underworld, where people tread more carefully.” And pronounce it without a capital, to save confusion. “We have to.”
I’m one of these,
I was saying, before he even met them,
and you’re not.

You made me this way
, I could’ve said, or
your family did
. I thought I’d leave it, let him figure that out for himself.

At least the floor was dry, this side of the gate. Here was another sharp turn, and now the light was better; here were steps leading down, and now he had smooth tiling underfoot and everything was clean.

And now the passage debouched onto a platform just like the one above, only older. No ads, no vending machines, no electronic destination boards. No electronics of any sort, and no announcements. Just the platform, and benches made of wood and cast iron, and us. No other passengers.

Jacey looked up and down and said, “What happens now?”

“We wait. Not too long.”

“And if trouble comes in the meantime? Say if the Corbies followed us regardless, underground or not? A flock of birds could get through that gate, even if a man didn’t have a clever card.”

I wasn’t so sure; I thought a flock of birds might find itself unexpectedly swallowed. He needed something else, though, so I said, “Well, then I guess we find out if you’re right, when you think you can take a Corbie. Or two. One at a time, I’d recommend. If they both come, I’ll keep one busy as best I can, until you’re ready.”

He looked at me narrowly. “Are you laughing at me?”

“Only a little,” and only because I didn’t want to do the other thing. I sat down then and patted the bench beside me. He was still being good; he stopped pacing, and sat beside me.

“The Tube is full of old abandoned stations,” I said. When in doubt, lecture. “Thirty, forty? I don’t know how many. Some were never finished, some were superseded, some were abandoned because they never had the traffic.”

“Mornington Crescent,” he said, nodding. Playing along.

“Exactly – though they reopened that one. People pressure. Anyway. One or two found themselves stranded at the end of a line that didn’t go anywhere, and keeping up a shuttle service back and forth is too expensive, just not worth the trouble.”

“Except...?”

“Except,” I said, nodding firmly. “For some of us, it’s worth the trouble. Welcome to the Ghost Train.” Immaculately timed, just as its lights appeared around the bend of the tunnel, with a blast of warm air to herald its arrival.

“Whoo,” he said, determinedly cheerfully ironic. “Should I be scared?”

Actually, Jacey? Yes, I think you should.
But I didn’t say so. We stood up and moved to the platform edge as the train drew to a halt. It was a short one, just two carriages; it looked out of scale with the platform, stranded almost, like a toy on the wrong gauge of track. But nobody was playing here, and looks weren’t important. It was big enough to take the traffic; that was all that mattered.

Jacey said, “Christ alive. Did you see the driver?”

“It’s better not to look. And don’t ask questions. I said that, remember? And keep your voice down” – as the doors slid apart and we stepped aboard – “these are real people. Hurt and frightened people, mostly. They’re entitled to a bit of respect.”

That would be a new and a strange notion to the people Jacey went around with ordinarily, his clubbing crowd, the gilded youth of the Overworld. He was trying, or at least, prepared to try; he took it on board in silence, as the train took us.

There were maybe half a dozen people in the carriage, scattered in ones and twos with plenty of distance between them. I didn’t imagine they’d been talking much in any case, but they watched us on and didn’t say a word.

I could feel Jacey’s distracted puzzlement, the way he knew that something more was odd here and didn’t understand what it was, one extra thing where everything was strange. I said, “This is old-style rolling stock. I don’t know how long it’s been running this line. Not quite from the days of steam, I guess, but...”

But there would still have been steam trains overhead, at any rate, when this stock first ran, even though the carriage doors down here slid closed with a hiss of air and the train pulled away in an electric silence. The upholstery was red and green, plush velvet and leather worn to a warm softness; shaded lamps glowed against the dark of the tunnel that swallowed us.

The carriage swayed and rattled. We found seats as far away as possible from everybody else, as everybody else had in their turn; it was probably a mathematical problem, reducible to a formula. Like tossing magnets into a dish and watching them repel each other.

Jacey said, “Come on, then. Straight answers now. Where have you brought me, and where is this train going?”

“It’s not about the place, it’s about the people. It’s just a short run to a station that never opened, because the line dead-ends. They wanted to call it Savoy, because it was meant to serve the hotel, and one of the exits would take you straight into the lobby, with a flunkey standing by to take your luggage; but of course anybody heading for the Savoy with luggage takes a taxi, so it was all wasted effort. We call it Stranded, because it is and we are and it’s under the Strand, ho ho.”

“We?”

I shrugged. “The runaways, the broken. People who’ve met the Overworld, and need a place to hide up for a while. Us.”

He flinched. “Desi.” He was still trying that name out, learning the shape of it in his mouth, wondering if it would ever mean the shape of me. “Do we really do that much harm?”

“What, you think you’re a boon and a blessing to men?”

“No, but – well, no worse than the merely mortal. Kings and millionaires, industrialists, profiteers. There always have been bad people at the top, and not everyone at the top has to be bad.”

“Oh, boy,” I said, “do you have a lot to learn.” But he was maybe ready to learn it, him with no shoes on and nothing in his pockets, nothing to fall back on: reduced to the pure essence of himself, Jacey alone. I thought he was rather nice, actually. But then, I always had. He was a little miracle, given where he came from.

Didn’t stop him being arrogant, heedless, extravagant, self-indulgent, half a dozen other character flaws I could mention. Spoiled rotten, basically. But that really wasn’t his fault; and compared with the people whose fault it was, they really were minor sins. I might have blamed him more if he’d contrived to spoil me too, the way he’d have liked to, early on. He let me think the Overworld was all champagne and roses, all the way for everyone, the way it was for him. But his parents disabused me fairly swiftly; and then I was on a mission, I wanted to save him.

And then I had to run and hide, and it was as much as I could do to save myself. I saw the underside of the Overworld, up close and extremely personal; and Fay turned into Desi, who was at least not so simple-minded; and now I wouldn’t try to change him if I could. Oh, there were lessons to be learned, and I’d teach them willingly, but I’d let him build them into what he had already, the man he was making of himself. By himself, I thought he was doing okay. Today, in the circumstances, I actually thought he was doing spectacularly well.