Whispers Under Ground

‘You know who that is,’ said Tyburn. ‘You put him there, you pinned him to the bridge.’

As an experiment I stuck my foot in the hole, which sucked at it with an unpleasantly organic movement.

The wail was fainter the third time, fading into the wind and the noise of the passers-by.

‘Sooner or later you’re going to have to set the hooknosed bastard free,’ said Tyburn.

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.

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