The Best of Connie Willis (37 page)

Unless it wasn’t real, and I was experiencing some bizarre form of hallucination.

“Finally,” a woman said, looking down the track, and I saw a train was approaching. Wind fluttered a flyer stuck on the wall and then the blond hair of the woman standing closest to the edge. She turned unconcernedly toward the man next to her, saying something to him, shifting the leather strap of her bag on her shoulder.

It hit again, an onslaught of cold and chemicals and corruption, a stench of decay.

He has to have felt that, I thought, looking down the platform, but he was unconcernedly boarding the train, the tourists next to him were looking up at the train and back down at their tube maps, unaware.

They have to have felt it, I thought, and saw the elderly black man. He was halfway down the platform, wearing a plaid jacket. He shuddered as the wind hit, and then hunched his gray grizzled head into his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing into its shell.

He
felt it, I thought, and started toward him, but he was already getting on the train, the doors were already starting to close. Even running, I wouldn’t reach him.

I bounded onto the nearest car as the doors whooshed shut and stood there just inside the door, waiting for the next station. As soon as the doors opened I jumped out, holding on to the edge of the door, to see if he got off. He didn’t, or at the next station, and Bond Street was easy. Nobody got off.

“Marble Arch,” the disembodied voice said, and the train pulled into the tiled station.

What the hell was at Marble Arch? There had never been this many people when Cath and I stayed at the Royal Hernia.

Everybody on the train was getting off.

But was the old man? I leaned out from the door, trying to see if he’d gotten off.

I couldn’t see him for the crowd. I stepped forward and was immediately elbowed aside by an equally large herd of people getting on.

I headed down the platform toward his car, craning my neck to spot his plaid jacket, his grizzled head in the exodus.

“The doors are closing,” the voice of the Tube said, and I turned just in time to see the train pull out, and the old man sitting inside, looking out at me.

And now what? I thought, standing on the abruptly deserted platform.
Go back to Holborn and see if it happened again and somebody else felt it? Somebody who wasn’t getting on a train.

Certainly nothing was going to happen here. This was our station, the one we had set out from every morning, come home to every night, the first time we were here, and there hadn’t been any strange winds. The Royal Hernia was only three blocks away, and we had run up the drafty stairs, holding hands, laughing about what the Old Man had said to the verger in Canterbury when he had shown us Thomas More’s grave—

The Old Man. He would know what was causing the winds, or how to find out. He loved mysteries. He had dragged us to Greenwich, the British Museum, and down into the crypt of St. Paul’s, trying to find out what had happened to the arm Nelson lost in one of his naval battles. If anybody could, he’d find out what was causing these winds.

And he should be here by now, I thought, looking at my watch. Good God. It was nearly one. I went over to the tube map on the wall to find the best way over to the conference. Go to Notting Hill Gate and take the District and Circle Line. I looked up at the sign above the platform to see how long it would be till the next train, so that when the wind hit, I didn’t have time to hunch down the way the old man had, to flinch away from the blow. My neck was fully extended, like Sir Thomas More’s on the block.

And it was like a blade, slicing through the platform with killing force. No charnel house smell this time, no heat. Nothing but blast and the smell of salt and iron. The scent of terror and blood and sudden death.

What
is
it? I thought, clutching blindly for the tiled wall. What
are
they?

The Old Man, I thought again. I have to find the Old Man.

I took the Tube to South Kensington and ran all the way to the conference, half-afraid he wouldn’t be there, but he was. I could hear his voice when I came in. The usual admiring group was clustered around him. I started across the lobby toward them.

Elliott detached himself from the group and came over to me.

“I need to see the Old Man,” I said.

He put a restraining hand on my arm. “Tom—” he said.

He looked like Cath had, sitting on the bed, telling me Sara was having an affair.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Nothing,” he said, glancing back toward the lounge. “Arthur—nothing.” He let go of my arm. “He’ll be overjoyed to see you. He’s been asking for you.”

The Old Man was sitting in an easy chair, holding court. He looked exactly the same as he had twenty years ago, his frame still lanky, his light hair still falling boyishly over his forehead.

See, Cath, I thought. No long white beard. No cane.

He broke off as soon as he saw us and stood up. “Tom, you young reprobate!” he said, and his voice sounded as strong as ever. “I’ve been waiting for you to get here all morning. Where were you?”

“In the Tube,” I said. “Something happened. I—”

“In the
Tube
? What were you doing down in the Tube?”

“I was—”

“Never use the Tube anymore,” he said. “It’s gone completely to hell ever since Tony Blair got into office. Like everything else.”

“I want you to come with me,” I said. “I want to show you something.”

“Come where?” he said. “Down in the Tube? Not on your life.” He sat back down. “I
loathe
the Tube. Smelly, dirty …”

He sounded like Cath.

“Look,” I said, wishing there weren’t all these people around. “Something peculiar happened to me in Charing Cross Station yesterday. You know the winds that blow through the tunnels when the trains come in?”

“I certainly do. Dreadful drafty places—”

“Exactly,” I said. “It’s the drafts I want you to see. Feel. They—”

“And catch my death of cold? No, thank you.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “These weren’t ordinary drafts. I was heading for the Northern Line platform, and—”

“You can tell me about it at lunch.” He turned back to the others. “Where shall we go?”

He had never, ever, in all the years I’d known him, asked anybody where to go for lunch. I blinked stupidly at him.

“How about the Bangkok House?” Elliott said.

The Old Man shook his head. “Their food’s too spicy. It always makes me bloat.”

“There’s a sushi place round the corner,” one of the admiring circle volunteered.

“
Sushi!
” he said, in a tone that put an end to the discussion.

I tried again. “Yesterday I was in Charing Cross Station, and this wind, this
blast
hit me that smelled like sulfur. It—”

“It’s the damned smog,” the Old Man said. “Too many cars. Too many people. It’s got nearly as bad as it was in the old days, when there were coal fires.”

Coal, I thought. Could that have been the smell I couldn’t identify? Coal smelled of sulfur.

“The inversion layer makes it worse,” the admirer who’d suggested sushi said.

“Inversion layer?” I said.

“Yes,” he said, pleased to have been noticed. “London’s in a shallow depression that causes inversion layers. That’s when a layer of warm air above the ground traps the surface air under it, so the smoke and particulates collect—”

“I thought we were going to lunch,” the Old Man said petulantly.

“Remember the time we tried to find out what had happened to Sherlock Holmes’s address?” I said. “This is an even stranger mystery.”

“That’s
right
,” he said. “221B Baker Street. I’d forgotten that. Do you remember the time I took you on a tour of Sir Thomas More’s head? Elliott, tell them what Sara said in Canterbury.”

Elliott told them, and they roared with laughter, the Old Man included. I half-expected somebody to say, “Those were the days.”

“Tom, tell everybody about that time we went to see
Kismet
,” the Old Man said.

“We’ve got tickets for
Endgames
for the five of us for tomorrow night,” I said, even though I knew what was coming.

He was already shaking his head. “I never go to plays anymore. The theater’s gone to hell like everything else. Lot of modernist nonsense.” He smacked his hands on the arms of the easy chair. “Lunch! Did we decide where we’re going?”

“What about the New Delhi Palace?” Elliott said.

“Can’t handle Indian food,” the Old Man, who had once gotten us thrown out of the New Delhi Palace by dancing with the Tandoori chicken, said. “Isn’t there anywhere that serves plain, ordinary food?”

“Wherever we’re going, we need to make up our minds,” the admirer said. “The afternoon session starts at two.”

“We can’t miss that,” the Old Man said. He looked around the circle. “So where are we going? Tom, are you coming to lunch with us?”

“I can’t,” I said. “I wish you’d come with me. It would be like old times.”

“Speaking of old times,” the Old Man said, turning back to the group, “I still haven’t told you about the time I got thrown out of
Kismet
. What was that harem girl’s name, Elliott?”

“Lalume,” Elliott said, turning to look at the Old Man, and I made my escape.

An inversion layer. Holding the air down so it couldn’t escape, trapping it belowground so that smoke and particulates, and smells, became concentrated, intensified.

I took the Tube back to Holborn and went down to the Central Line to look at the ventilation system. I found a couple of wall grates no larger than the size of a theater handbill and a louvered vent two-thirds
of the way down the westbound passage, but no fans, nothing that moved the air or connected it with the outside.

There had to be one. The deep stations went down hundreds of feet. They couldn’t rely on nature recirculating the air, especially with diesel fumes and carbon monoxide from the traffic up above. There must be ventilation. But some of these tube stations had been built as long ago as the 1880s, and Holborn looked like it hadn’t been repaired since then.

I went out into the large room containing the escalators and stood looking up. It was open all the way to the ticket machines at the top, and the station had wide doors on three sides, all open to the outside.

Even without ventilation, the air would eventually make its way up and out onto the streets of London. Wind would blow in from outside, and rain, and the movement of the people hurrying through the station, up the escalators, down the passages, would circulate it. But if there was an inversion layer, trapping the air close to the ground, keeping it from escaping—

Pockets of carbon monoxide and deadly methane accumulated in coal mines. The Tube was a lot like a mine, with the complicated bendings and turnings of its tunnels. Could pockets of air have accumulated in the train tunnels, becoming more concentrated, more lethal, as time went by?

The inversion layer would explain why there were winds, but not what had caused them in the first place. An IRA bombing, like I had thought when I felt the first one? That would explain the blast and the smell of explosives, but not the formaldehyde. Or the stifling smell of dirt in Charing Cross.

A collapse of one of the tunnels? Or a train accident?

I made the long trek back up to the station and asked the guard next to the ticket machines, “Do these tunnels ever collapse?”

“Oh, no, sir, they’re quite safe.” He smiled reassuringly. “There’s no need to worry.”

“But there must be accidents occasionally,” I said.

“I assure you, sir, the London Underground is the safest in the world.”

“What about bombings?” I asked. “The IRA—”

“The IRA has signed the peace agreement,” he said, looking at me suspiciously.

A few more questions, and I was likely to find myself arrested as an IRA bomber. I would have to ask the Old—Elliott. And in the meantime, I could try to find out if there were winds in all the stations or just a few.

“Can you show me how to get to the Tower of London?” I asked him, extending my tube map like a tourist.

“Yes, sir, you take the Central Line, that’s this red line, to Bank,” he said, tracing his finger along the map, “and then change to the District and Circle. And don’t worry. The London Underground is perfectly safe.”

Except for the winds, I thought, getting on the escalator. I got out a pen and marked an X on the stations I’d been to as I rode down. Marble Arch, Charing Cross, Sloane Square.

I hadn’t been to Russell Square. I rode there and waited in the passages and then on both platforms through two trains.

There wasn’t anything at Russell Square, but on the Metropolitan Line at St. Pancras there was the same shattering blast as at Charing Cross—heat and the acrid smells of sulfur and violent destruction.

There wasn’t anything at Barbican, or Aldgate, and I thought I knew why. At both of them the tracks were aboveground, with the platform open to the air. The winds would disperse naturally instead of being trapped, which meant I could eliminate most of the suburban stations.

But St. Paul’s and Chancery Lane were both underground, with deep, drafty tunnels, and there was nothing in either of them except a faint scent of diesel and mildew. There must be some other factor at work.

It isn’t the line they’re on, I thought, riding toward Warren Street.
Marble Arch and Holborn were on the Central Line, but Charing Cross wasn’t, and neither was St. Pancras. Maybe it was the convergence of them. Chancery Lane, St. Paul’s, and Russell Square all had only one line. Holborn had two lines, and Charing Cross had three. St. Pancras had five.

Those are the stations I should be checking, I thought, the ones where multiple lines meet, the ones honeycombed with tunnels and passages and turns. Monument, I thought, looking at the circles where green and purple and red lines converged. Baker Street and Moorgate.

Baker Street was closest, but hard to get to. Even though I was only two stops away, I’d have to switch over at Euston, take the Northern going the other way back to St. Pancras, and catch the Bakerloo. I was glad Cath wasn’t here to say, “I thought you said it was easy to get anywhere on the Tube.”