Page 76 of No Man's Land

Unmistakable, though. The putrid rot he’d seen on Sykes and all the other victims was eating its way, even now, into Alex’s body. And if Josef knew it, Alex bloody well knew it too.

At last, they reached the bottom of the spiral staircase, the air growing colder and damper with every turn of the stairs. A closed door greeted them. For a horrible moment, Josef feared—hoped?—it would be locked, but no. When Alex slowly turned the handle, the door moved with a grinding complaint that echoed, Josef was certain, through the whole bloody Underground network. They could probably hear it in Kentish Town.

Alex grimaced but kept pushing on the door until there was enough space to squeeze through. “Torch,” he demanded, holding one hand back towards Josef.

Muttering a curse about overbearing aristocrats, Josef handed him his torch. Suddenly plunged into darkness, he hurried through the door after Alex. This was not a place to fall behind.

On the other side, he found himself standing in a cavern. At least, that’s what it felt like, a large, cold, and echoing space that smelled like damp and decay. All he could see, though, were slashes of tiled walls and ceiling as Alex criss-crossed the torch beam around the huge space.

After a few moments, the fragmented images started to come together, and he realised they were standing in a stationtunnel. Three dark passageways disappeared ahead of them, and Josef could just make out words sayingWay Out. They must have led to the hydraulic lifts. To their right, the station platform opened.

“Come on,” Alex whispered, heading towards the platform.

With a wary glance back at the dark and silent passageways behind them, Josef followed. As they walked, Alex skimmed the torch across the walls, finding an old advertising board full of peeling advertisements for mortgages and property sales, and down to the rubble-strewn space where railway lines would once have run. Gone now, like the clerk had told them.

At the far end of the long platform, the tunnel divided, twin black maws leading off into deeper darkness. This had been a terminus, Josef remembered, so the tunnels only went in one direction—south, beneath the Thames. Somewhere in the darkness, water dripped, conjuring unhappy thoughts of leaking tunnels and a rush of filthy river water.

“There,” Alex whispered, stilling the roving torchlight on a crumpled pile of rags down in the track bed.

Josef stared in horror, chest tightening as his brain tried to make out a human form amid the rags. Was that a body? “What is it?” he rasped.

“Nest,” Alex said curtly. “At least one of them has been sleeping here.”

Josef’s skin prickled, and he looked around nervously. The torch cast just enough ambient light that he could make out a few details: King William St. tiled into the wall opposite, the rusty turnstiles that, once, would have admitted thousands of travellers each day, the empty signal box near the mouth of the tunnel. All abandoned, left to rot.

“If it sleeps here,” he whispered, “where is it now?”

The torchlight moved, shining towards the twin tunnel entrances. “You choose,” Alex said. “Left, or right?”

Chapter Twenty-three

“If the tunnels have been blocked off,” Josef said as they crept along the platform, “how did the ghoul get in here?”

“They’ve spent a thousand years worming into stone crypts. A few bricks won’t stop them.”

“Right.” Josef immediately tried to wipe that image from his mind.

At the end of the platform, they passed the abandoned signal box, its levers still in place. It was impossible not to imagine the last time they were used, the signalman leaving the station at the end of his final shift, the doors closing behind him and everything going dark.

Sometimes, at the front, he’d felt as if the whole world was going dark, that civilization itself was dying in the mud. One day, might everywhere be like this silent, abandoned place?

Alex swept his torch down onto the empty railbed. Was it Josef’s imagination, or did its light seem fainter?

“Good idea to get the gun out,” Alex said mildly. “We don’t know what we’re going to run into.”

“We’ve got an idea,” Josef muttered as Alex crouched down and, with one hand braced on the platform edge, hopped down onto the railbed.

Rather less elegantly, Josef scrambled down after him and pulled the Webley from the back of his waistband. It felt clumsy in his hands, and he wished Alex would use it instead.

Cautiously, they crept along the tunnel until the brickwork ended. After that point, the tunnel split into two, both lined with heavy sections of grey cast iron—presumably installed one by one as the tunnel was dug. They looked reassuringly strong. The leftmost tunnel was lower and dipped steeply down, while the rightward remained level.

“Which way?” Josef asked softly.

Alex wavered, torchlight dithering between the two tunnels. God, it was quiet. All Josef could hear was Alex’s breathing—too fast, too laboured—and the slow drip-drip-drip of water.

Fuck, he wanted to get out of there.

“The left,” Alex decided, indicating the downward sloping tunnel. “That’s where they are.”

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