Pandaemonium (10 page)

Onto the other platform, if you want to put it that way. It hadn’t ever been used for trains, but it did still look the part.

Actually, mostly what it looked like was Henry Moore’s wartime sketches, back when people used Tube stations routinely for bomb shelters and slept down there every night. Huddled, shrouded figures, somehow private and communal both at once: each little personal space like a single tesseract in a mosaic, helping to make a bigger picture.

There were no rails for a train to run along, down on the track below the platform edge. Even so, we had never colonised the railbed, either here in the lights of the open station or in the tunnel beyond. Stairs at each end of the platform offered an easy way down, and even so. People made their beds along the platform, and kept to it. Kids would race up and down the track, play cricket and their own more imaginative games, shriek and holler from one end to the other and dare each other into the tunnel’s dark – but never for too long, and they’d come back, come up when they were called. I think there’s something inadvertent in the human psyche, something ingrained. Tunnels are caves, and tigers lurk within; canyons are river-beds, only waiting for the flood.

Sometimes the kids seemed only too happy to be called away.

“What do you do for toilets, showers, laundry? Lunch, come to that?”

I grinned at him. “What, you think we’re a dirty people? Or a hungry one?”

“No, I just think you’ll have a solution, you must have. Only I can’t see it here.”

“Come with me. A tour of the facilities, courtesy of your willing guide.”

I wanted to take him out of earshot anyway. Nobody here would spy for anyone outside – or at least I thought not, and so did Reno, or she wouldn’t take them in. But I’d been wrong before. I’d missed a spy, so had other people, and trouble happened. For other people, mostly, then and later. Responsible was how I felt.

Learn from your own mistakes, and other people’s trouble. I was a lot more cautious now.

Other people, in their troubles. Coincidences happen, that’s why we have the word; it’s not all fate or physics, it doesn’t have to be inevitable. Sometimes it’s just chance.

Like when you’re walking along thinking about one person in particular, and suddenly there they are.

I’d been thinking about caves, and modern substitutes, and what you still might find inside them. And about spies, and the spied-upon, and what trouble that had led to. Dead people, in the end.

And here was a bench with someone sprawled along it, even their face covered with a blanket, which of course only made me think about the dead again though I’m sure they were only sleeping; and just beyond, huddled up against the foot of the bench was a figure shrouded in a blanket of his own, only he lifted his head as we passed and gazed up at me in a kind of bleak disintegration.

And I looked down at him and knew him, even in pieces as he was, just a shard of what he used to be; and what he used to be was resplendent and terrible beyond measure, cruel and generous and true. I had run away from him before, when he was the Sybil in her cave; but then she had been the one to run away, driven by foreknowledge, that day her cave was broken open and we were all dragged down to Hell. That day that Asher died, and Salomon too, and –

Gods, was it only yesterday? Really? Was that even possible?

Possible or not, we’d come a long way since then. Not in time, perhaps, and not in distance travelled, but a long way none the less.

Mostly down, I thought, for most of us.

For her, most certainly. For him, I mean. I thought I ought to mean. There wasn’t a trace of drag about him here; he was only a man in middle age, in torment. In a suit and tie beneath his blanket, because I guess that was what he did, how he dressed without thinking when he wasn’t being Sybil. Not being a voice in the wilderness, not singing out.

His suit and tie were doing him no good. Classic Englishman’s armour, but nothing can defend against destruction from within. His eyes were hollow horrors. If Sybil the
grande dame
still lurked anywhere inside him, that was where she showed, crouched in the cavern of his skull. Still seeing the world as it was and as it would be, her twin curse; still unable to change a thing.

I didn’t know, I couldn’t guess what song she would sing for herself, but I thought it was probably going around and around in her head now, the most vicious of earworms, chewing and chewing as it went.

There may be a thousand songs all called ‘Cassandra.’ Perhaps it was a medley.

There was nothing I could say, to ease her. Nothing true. She knew the truth. That was her trouble in a nutshell, and it always would be.

I’d barely even hesitated, when our eyes met; just long enough to know her –
him!
– and to know how lost he was.

Just enough for Jacey to feel it through the hand he still held, and to check in his turn and glance around; which was just time enough for me to recover, and nod, and move on.

A little tug had stopped him; another brought him back to my side again as we negotiated our way along the platform, around one nest and another. Some people had hung screens around their beds or built walls of cardboard boxes, some mock of privacy that everyone respected. I didn’t need to tell Jacey; he stepped as lightly as I did myself, with that same trick of seeming not to see.

At the far end of the platform were the stairs going down to the track, which we ignored. Also, there was a service door propped open.

“I don’t know if this was always the plan,” I said, “or if it cropped up in the digging. Maybe it was just accidental, someone hadn’t done the survey right and they broke through without warning and everybody blushed; but –”

But beyond the service door was a plain brick corridor that must run parallel to the tunnel proper, and must presumably give access to it through the various businesslike iron-framed doors we could see spaced out as far as the light reached ahead, until a curve cut it off.

Closer at hand, though, and on the other side of the corridor was another door. It didn’t promise much, maybe – it was plain wood and unadorned – but neither did it have the unappealing utility of the tunnel doors. And it was oddly warm to the touch when I laid my palm against it, and there was an inviting lamp on a bracket overhead. All in all, there was enough to say that something a little unexpected lay this way, without opening up at all what that might be. Like finding Narnia at the back of the wardrobe, and all those fur coats not having a thing to say about it.

I pushed the door open, and a billow of steam came out.

Jacey grunted. “What is this, the boiler-room? I’m not scrubbing down with a bucket drawn from the copper, girl...”

He didn’t need to scrub down at all, he was freshly showered; and in any case his nose was better than that, he could smell that it was no industrial furnace pumping out that fragrant steam.

I didn’t think either one of us would know Bay Rum if we smelled it, but I was fairly sure that was what we were smelling.

I said, “Not quite the boiler-room, no” – and ushered him through into what was, quite clearly, a boiler-room. Just, not for any Tube station or anything like it, except that this too was tiled floor to ceiling. Here the tiles were all white, and the boilers sat in the middle of the floor like gauche strangers in a private club, not knowing quite what to do with themselves; and there were benches and niches around the walls that all spoke about a different purpose before these great boilers came to squat and their fat black pipes broke through all the walls, and...

“It looks like a Turkish bath,” Jacey said slowly. “Or it used to, before.”

“Smart boy.” In olden days, I would have kissed him for reward. Not now. Not nowhere near now. Though I still kept hold of his hand. “It is a Turkish bath. This used to be the sweat-room, until the diggers broke through. With or without notice, I don’t know. But they must have wanted to keep the connection; maybe they figured that gentlemen heading up to the Savoy might like an hour to wash and brush up first. Only you couldn’t just step from the platform into the sweat-room, not in your nice heavy City suit, not where other customers were naked; so they changed things around and made this be the boiler-room instead. Which is a bit déclassé, maybe, making gentlemen walk through the coal-dust and the stokers – so actually maybe they did this for the workers, the navvies who dug out the tunnels, let them scrub off the day’s filth before they went home to the East End. Except it’s all a bit grand for navvies, so – oh, I don’t know. It’s a mystery. Ask Reno.

“Anyway,” I went on determinedly, tugging him past the boilers – all oil-fired and automatic now, no stoking required – and towards the further door, “this whole building was a Turkish bath below and a gentlemen’s club above, and it closed down back in the ’70s because there just weren’t any gentlemen left, and it’s never been open since. Mostly that’s because Reno holds the lease. Maybe she bribes the council, I wouldn’t know; maybe they’re on the board and it’s all legit. Anyway. At street level it’s all boarded-up and dark, we don’t use the upper storeys; but down here we get the best toilets, the best showers, the best baths in Westminster. And kitchens, too, of course; and there’s a back way out into an old graveyard that nobody goes near because of all the dodgy kids who hang out there. Actually that’s us, and that’s how we come and go if we don’t want to use the train. If we just want lunch somewhere that isn’t here, or a coffee with a friend, or a breath of air that hasn’t been breathed half a dozen times already. Are you hungry?”

He shook his head.

“Good, then. We’ve only just got here, and maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I’d really rather not show my face outside again this soon. I feel like half of London is looking for me. And I’m sure half the Overworld knows all about Savoy, but at least they can’t get there. Not without Reno’s consent, and she never gives that. Never ever.”

“Um. She, um, doesn’t look that formidable, Desi. Or at least, she most surely met someone more formidable than she is.”

“She did. Or a pack of someones, I always reckon – but even so. She made me feel safe, when almost nothing could.”
When you were trying so hard to find me, and your parents were trying harder.
“It’s not just Reno, after all, who guards Savoy. You saw the train driver.”

He shivered suddenly and violently, and I didn’t think he was shamming that at all. “I did. What – no, never mind. You’re right, I don’t want to know. If he’s on my side, I’m grateful, that’s all. I think I’m grateful.”

There were a lot of people in Savoy who would never accept that Jacey’s side was the same as ours, not under any circumstances. But I didn’t need to get into that right now. I tucked my arm through his as we came out into the central hall of the baths, and gave him a quick guided tour: lavatories, laundry-room, steam-room, plunge pool. “If you want a massage, there’s usually someone around. If they’re willing, they’re probably pretty good. Some people spend pretty much all their time in here.” Why wouldn’t they? It was hot, it was clean, it was safe. Massage was a skill, and people were glad to have it, glad to use it, glad to feel the benefit. For some Savoyards, that was enough right now. For some, perhaps it always would be.

By definition, that made this not such a good place to be talking privately. It was our hang-out spot, because where can you be comfortable in a Tube station? We soaked and sweated, we dozed and splashed and shivered, we groaned beneath hard fingers that found out all our sore spots – and, yes, we talked. Inevitably, we talked. And listened, that too. It seemed not to matter so much back when I truly belonged here, when I saw the same faces every day and could just assume that everyone knew my secrets already. Now, though, I was an interloper, however hard I tried to pretend otherwise; and I’d brought Jacey here, and Jacey was worse. Jacey was from the Overworld, and nobody’s victim at all, at least as far as anybody here was aware. Which made him totally fair game, and I wouldn’t let them loom around him like shadows in the steam, tapping into the losses of his day. His home might be gone and his motors too, I think we were both assuming that; his self-respect was severely dented, standing in borrowed boots. No stranger was going to pry into his privacy too, as long as I had anything to do with it.

I had a plan; of course I did. I showed him all around the subterranean baths, and the busy kitchens beyond, another hang-out spot no use to us right now; and then I took him up.

Up a winding spiral marble staircase, into the hallway of the old club.

“I thought you said you didn’t come up here?”

“I said it was all boarded up, and we didn’t use it. Which is true. Sort of. But.”

But for a building long abandoned, the floor was oddly well-swept, and the air was fresh. Perhaps there were broken windows and missing boards – but then one would look for birds’ nests on the high ledges and droppings clustered underneath, and there was none of that. A person might think, perhaps, that people might come up here quite often. And might want to hide that fact, might sweep out the whole hallway to disguise the tracks their feet made through dust and grit, up from below and going higher yet, up the grand sweeping staircase to the upper floors.

Up, and up again: to where a glass dome stood above the stairwell, circled by an iron gallery. Here was the only daylight in the building, the bright sun making the most of its chance; here we could know we were alone. Here I could perch on the railing with the long fall at my back; I could wind my legs around his as though I were afraid of falling, the way I used to when we were kids, when we were lovers; I could smile at him a little twistedly, a little ruefully, and say, “We’re safe to talk up here.”