Read Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) Online
Authors: Ben Aaronovitch
Not any time soon, I thought.
‘I don’t want to die in a hole with my eyes closed,’ I said, and shoved my foot in up to the ankle.
‘Don’t do that,’ said Tyburn, and jumped into the ditch with me. ‘I know a better way.’
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘What’s that, then?’
‘This,’ he said, and hit me on the side of the head with the pommel of his sword.
I regretted the decision as soon as I opened my eyes to darkness, and the feel of water sloshing around my knees. It was cold – a wetsuit won’t keep you warm if you don’t move about.
I wondered if I hadn’t been a bit hasty. Was it better to die in the illusion of sunshine and warmth or face death in a cold darkness of reality? Was it better to die in happy ignorance or terrified knowledge. The answer, if you’re a Londoner, is that it’s better not to die at all.
So that is when I came up with the most ridiculous plan since I’d decided to take a witness statement from a ghost. It was a plan so stupid that even Baldrick would have rejected it out of hand.
I was going to reach out and contact Toby the Dog with my mind. Well not exactly with my mind – that would have been unlikely. Ever since Molly sent me on my little trip down London’s memory lane it had seemed obvious to me that all the accumulated
vestigia
that seemed to power the ghosts of the city were somehow connected. Information was definitely being passed from location to location. Like a magical internet. How else had I seen so much of the city while my physical body had remained in the Folly? I figured that if I could generate a sort of formless
forma
, enough to put magic into the stone, it might be possible to create a signal – a beacon that would propagate through the stone memory that might be detected by a particularly sensitive dog of my acquaintance. Who would then bark in an expressive fashion and rush over to Oxford Circus as fast as his little legs would carry him. There he would scamper about snuffling amongst the debris and a particularly intuitive rescue worker would say, ‘Hold up, I think the mutt may be on to something.’
Did I not say it was the most ridiculous plan I’d ever thought of? It had to be Toby because one of the first things I’d done, once Lesley had become an apprentice, was to buy a pack of ESP cards and see if I could use magic to talk mind to mind. So me, Lesley and Dr Walid spent a fun afternoon recreating various bonkers telepathy experiments from the 1960s and ’70s with disappointing results. Even the one experiment where I tried to identify the
forma
that Lesley was creating didn’t work properly because while I could sense the ‘shape’ in the magic I couldn’t have told you what it was. And besides, even that much only worked when we were less than a metre apart.
That’s what I hate about science – negative results.
But Toby had been proven to be sensitive to magic. And I’d always thought we’d shared a special affinity. And the water was pooling around my ribs and I was getting desperate.
I took a deep breath and created
a forma
in my mind. It was like
Lux
, which you use for creating werelights and, with a bit of modification, fireballs, skinny grenades and a really hot flame thing that I have hopes I could use for burning through steel if only I could get the heat to go in one direction only. Like the ESP experiments, I try to avoid telling Nightingale about my little innovations unless I have to explain why one of the labs is on fire.
Lux
was perfect because it’s known to put a lot of magic into the environment, and what I was going for was cool but noisy.
A dim blue light filled my concrete coffin, which was now half full of water. Reflections rippled across the ceiling in thin twists of green. I tried to maintain it for as long as I could, but the pain in my head got worse and the
forma
slipped from my mind.
In my imagination, I began to hear the voices of the dead. At least I hoped it was my imagination. A lot of people have died in the Underground, through accidents, through stupidity, or suicide. All the
one-unders
whose dying wish had been to make other people late for work.
I heard all these
one-unders
as distant wordless cries of despair and anger that cut off with the same sudden bluntness as Macky the luckless graffiti artist.
‘I’m not one of them,’ I shouted – although I think it was only in my head.
And suddenly they were upon me. All the accumulated casualties, from the train crashes and the fires and the victims of the hideous suicide of the Bradford boy who didn’t want to work in Father’s chip shop no more. A lot of them had gone without warning but others had time to realise what was happening and some, the worst of all the cries, had time to build up a head of hope before the darkness swept them up into the stone and concrete memory of the tunnels.
The rising water was a cold band across my chest.
I didn’t want to die, but the truth is that the choice isn’t in your hands.
Sometimes the only thing you can do is wait, endure and hope.
I heard rattling and scraping above me and for a moment I thought it might be Sir Tyburn back for another chat, but then I heard the unmistakable and beautiful sound of a pneumatic drill.
I waited for a pause in the drilling and gave panicked screaming one last shot – this time with feeling.
Dust filled my mouth.
Then there was light in my eyes which was suddenly obscured by a big black face.
‘You all right, mate?’ asked the face. I refocused and caught a flash of yellow helmet and heavy fire-resistant jacket. ‘Are you Peter Grant?’
I tried to say yes but my throat was clogged with dust.
‘Want some water?’ asked the fireman. He didn’t wait for me to answer. Instead he gently pushed a plastic drinking straw between my lips. ‘Just a little bit at first,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry there’s no paramedic for this, but things are a little tricky.’
Water trickled into my mouth and tasted the way water does when you’ve been thirsty for hours – like life itself. How long had I been buried? I tried to ask, but it just made me cough. I stuck to drinking the beautiful water instead. I sluiced it around my mouth and pulled my head back – the fireman withdrew the straw. I realised that he was lying on the platform floor peering down at me through a hole. Behind him was a portable floodlight on a tripod and behind that, visible in the reflected light, was more rubble. This was confusing me. I was fairly certain I’d only fallen a couple of metres.
It took them at least another hour to dig me out.
It’s difficult to describe the serenity of rescue, like a second birth. Only this time you’re secure in the knowledge that you know what you’re going to do with your life – even if it’s just what you were doing before.
They put me on a stretcher, plugged me into a drip, a heart monitor and gave me a cool breath of oxygen. It’s was all good right up to the moment Lady Ty leaned over and frowned down at me.
‘Tyburn,’ I said.
She smiled thinly. ‘Who were you expecting?’ she asked. ‘International Rescue?’
I didn’t say Toby the Dog because I don’t have a death wish.
‘Did you hear me calling?’ I said, checking to make sure nobody was close enough to hear. ‘I was calling with magic.’
‘I smelt you, boy,’ she said. ‘You were stinking up the sewers and, while I had half a mind to leave you, I couldn’t take the risk that you’d smell worse dead.’
She leant down until her lips were by my ear. Her breath was spiced with nutmeg and saffron. ‘One day,’ she murmured, ‘I will ask you for a favour and do you know what your response will be?’
‘Yes ma’am, no ma’am – three bags full, ma’am.’
‘You only become my enemy if you get in my way, Peter,’ she said. ‘If you get in my way you should make sure my enemy is what you want to be.’
She straightened up and before I could think of something clever to say she was gone.
I
’ve never been one of those people who tell everyone they’re fine and try to climb out of their hospital bed. Feeling as shit as I did is your body’s way of telling you to lie the fuck down and take in fluids – preferably intravenously – so that’s what I did.
I was a little surprised that they took me to UCH, which was not the closest casualty unit, until Dr Walid appeared in my treatment cubicle and proceeded to loom over the shoulder of the junior doctor who was treating me for various cuts, bruises, scrapes and possible exposure. To give him his credit, the junior doctor who – from his accent – had inherited his breezy confidence and a private education from his parents, tried for professional insouciance. But there’s just something uniquely intimidating about a wiry six-foot Scot. Once he’d arranged to have a nurse come and put the actual bandages on, he gave me a professional smile and legged it out of there as fast he could go.
By day Dr Walid is a world-renowned gastroenterologist, but by night he dons his sinister white coat and becomes England’s foremost expert on crypto-pathology. Anything weird that turns up, living or dead, gets examined by Dr Walid – including me and Lesley.
‘Good evening, Peter,’ he said as he advanced on me. ‘I was hoping you’d make it all the way to Christmas intact.’
He became the fifth person to shine a light in my eyes to check for pupil reactions. Or perhaps he was looking for something different.
‘Does this mean you’re going to stick me back in the MRI?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said Dr Walid with great relish. ‘Between you and Lesley I’m finally beginning to develop some decent data on what happens to your brain when you become a practitioner.’
‘Anything I should know about?’
‘Early days yet,’ he said. ‘But I’d like to get you booked in as soon as possible. I’m supposed to be on the train to Glasgow tonight.’
‘Are you going home for Christmas?’
Dr Walid perched on the edge of bed and scribbled a few notes on a clipboard. ‘I always go back to Oban for the holidays.’
‘So the rest of your family aren’t Muslims then?’
Dr Walid chuckled. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Loyal sons and daughters of the Kirk each and every one of them. Very dour, serious people except at this time of the year. They celebrate Christmas and I celebrate them. Besides, they’re always pleased to see me since I bring the bird to the feast.’
‘You take the turkey?’
‘Of course,’ said Dr Walid. ‘I have to be sure it’s properly Halal after all.’
True to his word, I was decanted into a wheelchair and raced up to the imaging department where they stuck my head in the MRI. It’s an expensive piece of kit and has a strict waiting list for tests that Dr Walid seems to ride roughshod over at will. When I asked him where his extraordinary privileges came from he explained that the Folly, through a charity first established in 1872, made a contribution to the hospital finances and in return he got to pre-empt non-emergency cases.
The techs who ran the MRI had been seeing me and Lesley on a regular basis since the summer – god knows what they thought I had. Some form of rare brain cancer I suppose. I must have been getting used to the machine, because, despite the sledgehammer sound of the magnetic coils, I drifted off to sleep mid-scan.
I
woke up in a private room, the same one Nightingale had been stashed in when he got shot, I thought, to find Lesley asleep in a chair by my bed. She can’t sleep in the mask so she was barefaced but with her head twisted awkwardly away from the door to make sure nobody could look in and see her face. Her mask was clutched in one hand, ready for instant donning if I woke up.
In sleep, her face looked just as horrible but weirdly more like a face. I found it easier to look at when I knew she wasn’t looking back at me – judging my reactions. It was dark outside but this time of year that could be late afternoon or early morning. I weighed up not waking Lesley against her probable reaction should she catch me staring at her face without permission.
I lay back in my bed, closed my eyes and groaned theatrically until Lesley woke up.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’ve got it back on.’
I had an inkling how long I’d been asleep when I had to rush to the bathroom down the corridor and spend what seemed an inordinate amount of time having a wee. After a shower and a change into a new and clean but otherwise identical open-back hospital gown, I climbed gratefully back into my bed and went back to sleep.
I woke up to daylight and the smell of McDonald’s – my stomach rumbled.
Lesley had returned with an unauthorised dinner, the newspapers and reassurances that Kumar and Reynolds had both escaped with minor cuts and bruises.
‘And Miss FBI,’ said Lesley. ‘What was all that about?’
In exchange for a Big Mac and the promise that she’d fetch me some clean clothes I told her all about Peter Grant’s adventures underground. She particularly liked the Holland Park rave and the part where I hallucinated myself back into the fourteenth century.
‘I bet he was fit,’ she said. ‘All these supernatural types are fit.’
I was almost afraid to ask. ‘Did we make the papers?’
Lesley held up a tabloid with the understated headline TERROR ON THE UNDERGROUND. I pointed out that they’d missed the Christmas angle so Lesley held up another tabloid with XMAS TUBE FEAR covering the whole front page. I was tempted to lie back down and pull the covers over my head.
The Commissioner had turned up on TV to state categorically that terrorism was not involved and in this he was backed up by Transport for London and the Home Office. It was strongly hinted that a water leak had undermined the platform and caused a localised collapse. The damage was confined to the platform and a resumption of train services was expected in time for the Boxing Day sales.
There was a noticeable absence of CCTV footage or even stuff caught on phone cameras. I discovered later that whatever my friend the Earthbender had done it had fried every chip within ten metres and degraded cameras and phones out to another twenty.