A Madness of Angels

shuddered again and the carriage was cold and empty, the wind driving at our faces like each particle held microscopic knives, and a grudge to make it worse.

Oda screamed over the roar, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

“Give it a minute!” I shouted back.

A flash of light outside, and for a second I saw the walls of Kings Cross St Pancras underground station – but only a second, and we made no attempt to stop; the entire length of the platform was gone by in the time it took to draw a breath. Newspapers billowed around my knees, old crunched-up drinks cans and hamburger packets rolled down the carriage as we picked up yet more speed, and when I tried to lift my foot, the chewing gum glooped and tugged my ankle back down, so only with a great physical wrench could I get free of its hold.

When the stop came, it came so fast and so hard that it threw me to the floor, and tossed Oda hard against the cracked glass panel dividing a row of seats from the door space. I picked myself up onto my knees, ancient black gum clinging to my palms, and looked round. We were still moving, I realised; I could feel the hum of the engines through the floor and hear the high-pitched whine of the ventilation and the electric belly of the train pushing power into the wheels, but it was no longer the heady drive of our first acceleration. Now, with the lights steady and low, the carriage was no longer empty.

Shadows, semi-transparent forms, filled every seat and every corner of the carriage. A grey, faceless woman rocked a silent grey sleeping baby; a grey, faceless man bopped to his silent music, its thin grey wires flapping around his head as he moved. A man in a bowler hat made way for an old woman with a walking stick; a family with big touristlike bags on wheels shuffled deeper into the carriage as a woman struggled to position a ’cello against the far wall. They weren’t ghosts – ghosts have faces, expressions, sounds, reasons – these were utterly silent, anonymous, forgettable faces that had been forgotten, their features melted into each other to leave nothing but a blank shadow. I looked out of the window and saw only the glowing straight lines of railway tracks, dozens of them, hundreds, on either side, stretching away in parallel, polished steel glowing on the top, black rusted metal beneath, spread out on either side of us like lanes on a motorway, as far as the eye could see before they faded into the inevitable darkness.

Oda crawled up painfully from where she’d fallen, shaking her head when I offered her a hand, and whispered, “What is this?”

“The train needs passengers,” I replied, turning to let a shadow of a man in a baggy jacket with a prominent beard push by me towards the carriage door, where he grabbed a fabric handle with fingers no thicker than mist, swaying gently with the quiet, steady rhythm of the train, te-dum. Te-dum. Te-dum.

“Are they… alive?”

“In a sense. They go everywhere in the underground, all the time, forever; they’re part of it, like its memory.”

“That doesn’t sound alive to me.”

“They are like us,” we said. “They are what comes when you put so much life into one place. They are everywhere and nowhere, they came into existence when the first people gasped at the wonder of this new way of travelling, and marvelled at it, and they will only die when the last train closes its doors, and no one remembers that there ever was a railway underground. That is to say, not for a very long time. We are the same.”

“Wonderful,” she hissed between her teeth.

I grinned. “Not even slightly afraid?” I asked.

She glared.

I opened up my bag of goodies and pulled out the sudoku book. All heads turned in the carriage; dozens of empty eyes fixed on us. I waited until I was sure I had their attention, then, still kneeling down, I put it on the floor of the carriage. I laid the biro on top of it, the romantic novel next to it, unwrapped the chewing gum package so the top button of white gum was visible, and stepped back. The shadows drifted towards us, the shape of a fat lady in a big dress rising up from her seat, the image of a girl with a heavy rucksack moving down towards us, the ghostlike form of an old bent man. They huddled towards the pile, reaching out for it. As they advanced I pushed Oda gently back, until we were both pressed into the doorway. The shadows grew thicker and thicker around the sacrificed goods on the carriage floor, flooding in; and still more came, until there were at least two dozen figures occupying barely a square foot between them, their forms blending into a dark, opaque mass. The books, biro and gum became obscured by a churning mass of almost-solid-looking shapes, from which the occasional ghostly head or shadow arm would emerge, before sinking back into the mêlée.

When the shadows emerged again, pulling themselves clear, each drifted back to where they’d been without a sound or a backward look. Where they had congregated, there was nothing left on the floor but a scrap of chewing gum wrapper, and a torn page of a sudoku book, all the numbers filled in with neat blue biro.

Oda opened her mouth to speak, and the train jerked, nearly sending us flying again. She clung on to a handle and shouted over the roar of the accelerating engine, “What happened there?”

“It’s a sacrifice,” I yelled back as we began to sway and bounce along the tracks. “You sacrifice what they most desire!”

“A sudoku book?”

“Something anonymous, occupying, something to do so you don’t have to look at the rest of the train – yes, a sudoku book and a trashy novel! That’s what you do on the underground!”

Another wrench as we built up speed. For a moment, as we rounded a corner, I could see the other carriages curving away for ever into the darkness, before the line straightened again and they vanished. Sparks flew up from the wheels and flashed across the windows; the lights in the carriage faltered and one or two burst, with a pop and a puff of smoke. The rising and falling darkness raised and banished the shadow figures, so that one second the carriage was full, the next empty, with each dimming of the lights. Outside, for a second, another train rushed by, with a roar and a scream and the thumpthumpthumpthump of air trapped and pounded by the passage of so much metal – I saw a man reading a newspaper, a woman doing her knitting – before the image of the train was snatched away from us again and there was just the darkness and the reflection of our own faces in the scratched glass. We laughed out loud as the sparks splashing up from the wheels rose up around the windows in a blinding backwards waterfall, filling the darkness with electric pops that made the carriage burn with whiteness and the air hum with electricity, obscuring our view and rising up so high and so bright that we had to turn our eyes away and squeeze them shut against their radiance.

The sparks drifted down with the tone of the engine as we began another sharp deceleration. The shock of it knocked me sideways, banging into Oda as her grip slipped from the handle. I caught her instinctively as she staggered across the carriage with the declining movement of the train, and held her tightly by the arm while the sheet of fire outside our window faded, and the lights became dull and normal, the shadows receded down to nothing and, once again, outside I saw the flash of dirt-covered cabling.

Then came a dimly lit platform: neglected concrete and old beige tiles. We came to a halt and, clunking, the carriage doors opened. I stepped out into the cold air of the platform; Oda picked up her sports bag and, with an unsteady step, followed me. Behind us, the carriage doors slammed shut, and the train rattled away.

I looked around for a sign, and saw one: Aldwych.

I laughed. Oda said, “I’m glad you found that funny.”

“Live a little,” I replied. “Welcome to Aldwych station.”

“I’ve never heard of Aldwych station.”

“It’s a closed station. It used to be on the Piccadilly line.”

“Then how did we get here?”

“Are you really going to ask such inane questions all the time? Mystic bloody forces; just accept them and cope!”

There was a polite cough from the other end of the platform. Oda’s hand flew to her bag. I said, “Hello.”

There were three of them, a man and two women. They stood in the entrance to the platform, underneath an old-fashioned sign of a black metal hand with an outstretched finger, below which was the word “Exit”. They had guns. They weren’t smiling. “Evening,” said one of the women, stepping forward. “Were you wanting to see us?”

They took Oda’s bag. That made her angry but at least she coped without shouting. They took my satchel. I said nothing, and wished I had deeper pockets.

Then they blindfolded us and, with a hand on our arm, took us walking. By the gentle rumbling through my