A Madness of Angels

opened up the vending machine, took the day’s coins and filled it with tomorrow’s old, overpriced chocolate and cans of drink. That took us nearly ten minutes of sitting, huddled in the darkness at the edge of the platform, trying to limit the sound of our own breaths.

When he finished, he turned the lights down, so that the entire place was washed with a low pinkish-orange neon glow rising up from behind the benches, reflecting strangely off the glass panels of the advertising boards. I heard the clattering of the iron gate at the front of the station being drawn shut. At my side Oda whispered, “Enough?”

I nodded.

She scrambled back up the platform, hastily moving away from me and self-consciously brushing the dirt off her clothes. I looked up at the dead indicator board and said, “We just have to wait now.”

“Wait for what?” she groaned.

“You wanted to be part of this so badly you had to attack me and kidnap a man,” I said, surprised at how calm I sounded. “Now you just watch and learn.”

I sat down on a bench, wrapping my dirty coat around me against the cold and sudden stillness of the place, and waited. Oda paced, jaw set in a tight, angry line. I tried to judge the minutes by the length of her walk – four progressions back and forth seemed to equal roughly a minute. My eyes felt heavy, my skin hot and tired, my hair dirty and my stomach full of lead. I let my head hang down, although we stayed on edge, ears more alert even as our eyelids fell, and drifted. We heard the drip of a water pipe and the distant rumble of a bus somewhere overhead. Our senses drifted without thinking into those of a mouse scuttling along by the electrified rail, sniffing out discarded food. We enjoyed the sensitivity of its nose, twitching it and feeling our entire face change shape slightly with that movement, and the sensitivity of our whiskers as they picked up on the reverberation of Oda’s walking, like each footstep was the last hum of a ringing bell left in the air.

“Sorcerer!”

Her voice frightened the mouse, so I let its mind go and quickly looked up. Oda’s face was a garish pinky- orange in the light of the platform, and her eyes were turned up towards the indicator board. In large orange letters, it read:

“1) Circle line via KingsX – 2 mins”

And nothing more.

For a moment we both looked at it, then Oda said, “Is this a spell of yours?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s the last train,” I explained gently. “The real last train. It’s… like the Beggar King, or the Bag Lady.”

“This means nothing,” she snapped, and the anger meant there was fear too – fear of magic in general, or the train itself; I couldn’t be sure.

I struggled with the words. “Some ideas are more than just random moments of good inspiration. Some ideas become real whether you mean them or not.”

“So what… idea is it that’s due here in two minutes?”

“The train that doesn’t ever stop travelling,” I said. “That goes round and round the Circle line forever.”

A cold wind on my face, from the end of the tunnel, a smell of dirty deep underground. We breathed it in, deeply.

“That’s absurd.”

“For a woman who has dedicated her life to the eradication of mystic forces, you have a very limited comprehension of what you’re dealing with.” A distant growing te-dum, te-dum, te-dum. The hairs on my scalp twitched with the coldness rising up and tickling my skin; the track itself gave a creak of added strain. I got to my feet, picking up my small plastic bag of sudoku, biro and chewing gum.

“And this train…” she said, struggling to keep the fear out of her voice, “this will take us to the Whites?”

“The Whites should already know we’re coming,” I said.

“How?”

I pointed across the other side of the platform. By the board telling you how to get a train to Luton, the pair of painted-on black-and-white Egyptian eyes, with their long curves and deep, stylised quality, were now open. Their black pupils and grey-flecked irises stared right at us.

Oda followed my gaze. She stammered, “It’s not a trick of the mind.”

“No.”

“Is what you do always like this, sorcerer?”

“No. But if it was, life would be perfection,” we said. We walked towards the edge of the platform, toes peeking over the edge of the yellow “Do Not Cross” line. In the tunnel at the other end of the station, a pair of dull white lights appeared, like the eyes of a hunting cat, glowing bigger and bigger out of the darkness. As they emerged, so did the dim light of a driver’s compartment, empty except for a black shadow of no definable features. Growing with the sound of the rattling, hissing, spitting wheels as they threw up fat blue sparks across the ballast of the track and with the shrieking of brakes like the final breath of a dying banshee, the last train pulled up onto the platform of Farringdon station, and opened its doors.

The last train had once been white, but its paintwork was stained off-grey with neglect and age, and its surface scratched and tainted with brown bubbling rust. Its windows were almost impossible to see through, they were so scratched and criss-crossed with messages scoured into them. The doors, when they opened, did so with a scrape like fingernails down a blackboard, as rust edged over rust. Looking into the dim yellow glow of the carriages, I saw no passengers, just a slatted floor stained black by trodden-in chewing gum, and scattered with the remnants of old newspapers that drifted like feathers in a breeze. The seat covers were so thin, you could see the stuffing beneath, where it hadn’t already spilled out; the glass on the emergency alarm was cracked and looked like it might fall out of its holder at any moment; and the fabric straps hanging from the support poles in the ceiling swayed gently by themselves after the train had stopped. At either end of the carriage the windows were open wide, and the place hummed with ventilation rising from behind the battered seats.

Oda said, “This is what I think they meant by Satanic inclination.”

“You haven’t even given it a go,” I said. “Think of how small the human race would be if people didn’t give such inclinings a chance.”

I stepped cautiously up into the carriage, and when nothing happened, I turned and faced her, still standing uncertainly on the platform. “You trusted me at Bond Street,” I said, holding out my hand. “Trust me now.”

“Is it… necessary?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She took my hand; she stepped up into the carriage. Almost immediately, the doors started to wail, a high- pitched, shrilling, too-loud sound that made me wince away, as with a heavy, final bang, they slammed shut. The train jerked sharply, and started to move. I wrapped my hand into one of the fabric loops drooping down from the ceiling and said, “I have a confession.”

“What?” she asked, as the train slowly picked up speed with a low whine.

“I’ve never taken the last train before.”

“Why not?”

“It’s easy to get lost.”

She grunted, then nearly lost her footing as with another jerk, the train accelerated more sharply, the warm glow of the platform vanishing as we hit the tunnel. She dropped her bag and wrapped her hands quickly round a pole in the middle of the carriage, pressing herself against it for support as we picked up speed. The wind from the open window at the far end of the carriage tore past us and away as we ploughed into the darkness, pulling at hair and clothes until my coat snapped like a flag in a gale. I saw the pale red and yellow shades of the dirty cabling outside the window draw apart as tracks joined, split, widened; then saw the cables disappear entirely, the light from inside the carriage falling on, as far as I could tell, nothing at all, no texture outside, not even the curve of a black wall, just blackness itself. The lights flickered in the ceiling and for a moment, in each intermittent flash, the carriage wasn’t empty, but I was standing pressed in shoulder-to-shoulder with a hundred grey faces, featureless, with perhaps the hint of a hat here or the suggestion of a baby’s buggy there, blocking up the doorway, pressed in so tight that for that moment I could barely breathe and the heat of it burnt down to my bones, before the lights