Personal Darkness (39 page)

Like the inside of a wine cask, a barrel, these passageways, the scattering coils of rails, like carelessly cast rope.

The Underground by night.

And now, after the monster had passed, the man came walking.

Malach moved without a sound through the labyrinth of the tunnels. He took another branch, and the rumbling of the monster died away.

Mice cheeped from their own city of holes and runnels.

The aroma of this Hell was like that of an old chimney, soot and dirt and unreal atmosphere heated too high and inadequately cooled. In places were lights, in others not. Sometimes deep-throated breezes blew, odored with distant electricity, for somewhere a train had passed, some carrier between the closed stations.

Malach's face, now lit, now lost. Impossible to read there anything, not even when thick, choked light began to shine back on him from the darkness.

The clink of implements along the rails, like .trapped miners, tapping with their last strength, for rescue, which would never come.

Malach moved down the tunnel and entered the light.

A maintenance gang in gaudy dungarees, clicketing at the coils on the ground. Heads turned. A pallid Irish face with sad and smoky eyes, a black man closed on an anger which would never speak. Here they are, trapped in the mine of life, tapping. But who has come?

"Hey, mate—"

Another man nudged the speaker.

They stood aside, to let him go by.

The black man said: "Tea urn next platform. Don't go no further."

As he passed, Malach raised his hand, and the black man clapped his own into it. It was a salute seldom shared with a white, but in this case, for some reason, permissible.

When Malach had gone by, the black man found a note of money in his palm, stuck there like a butterfly wing.

"Mary, Mother of God," said the Irishman.

They stood, looking at the note.

Out on the platform the half-orange-clad foreman in his vest, gaped at Malach passing down the line.

"Here, you—"

Malach paid no attention.

The man at the urn shook his head. "Leave it, Eddie."

Beyond the station, another stretch of the dark, and then more lights, and a group of women bundled in dungarees with silver faces gauzed in little breathing masks. One sang in a low and burning voice, "Every time we say good-bye—"

The song was stilled. As the maintenance gang had done, the gang of women fluffers stared. They were the moths beneath the earth who brushed off the dense black powder of shed skin, webbed hair, the dregs of expiry, psychic shadow and decay, pumped daily out into these curved arteries. They were a lost tribe, living by night like vampires, in the coffins of the tube.

"Darlin'," said one to Malach, "don't go on no further."

"No, lovey," said another. "There's a dead 'un."

"She means," said the singer, and her voice was honey, spoiled by rust, "the next station, it's closed."

"Since the 1950s," said another, a fat woman.

"Not tonight," said Malach.

The women drew aside. "You ain't with
that
?"

"No," Malach said.

"Scum," said the woman who had not sung. "I'd do for 'em. But we can't do nothing."

"You hear it," said the singer. "Far off."

"Tonight," said Malach, "silence will come."

They looked. The singer nodded. She sang, in a murmur, not like the sea but like some distant train moving over honey: "I die a little."

Malach took her hand. He drew close to her, and put down his head until his forehead rested on her dusty hair. She smelled of trying to keep clean against great odds. Never had a man held her, touched her, as this one did. Never such a man. And never again.

When he was gone, the one who did not sing, laughed. But then she stopped laughing.

"Look."

They looked at the note.

"Toy-Town money," said one of them.

"Must be."

The dark had swallowed him, the turn toward the ghost station.

"See what I found?" said the fat woman. She held up a man's leg. It was artificial. "I found a hand, Thursday," said another. The women drew back along the tunnel, towards the urn of tea.

Down here they had always found things. Wine cellars and pits of plague. Skeletons. Once, a great dinosaur, removed in portions, stealthily, not to halt the work of excavation. And there had been banquets to prove the safety of the vaulted tunnels, candelabra gleaming and the chink of thin crystal goblets spangled with champagne.

And now, the chink of a goblet, up ahead, and the glow of new light.

The money had been the payment of passaging, coins for the ferryman.

And crossing over the bone-dry Styx, hell within Hell.

A reddish glare lit the closed station beyond the second tunnel, unveiling oddly the placards and the posters, half-transparent with age. Hovis, Ovaltine, Pears Soap, girls on bicycles and girls who swung from the moon. But they were phantoms now, forced to look on at changing times.

A ring of red workmens' warning lanterns, and flung up on the walls, sparking, searing oxyacetylene torches, blasting in a primitive fever.

On the platform they had formed the arena.

Men in tailored garments with elegant hand-set sleeves, Italian shoes. Eight men. One with his hair held back in a ponytail by a clip of ivory. One with a coat of fur. The glint of a couple of gold-banded cigarettes. Champagne bottles in vacuum coolers, and shallow glasses. Over the ozone, chimney scent, the perfumes of rich men. Cologne and aftershave and hair oil. And over that again, already, a meaty throbbing smell.

The two black dogs, barrel-shaped like the tunnels, spade-formed faces, all jaws, the muzzles off, tugging and growling. The men laughed at their eagerness.

As they let them go, the man in the fur gave the nearer dog a sharp kick. It did not seem to notice as it belted forward.

The first blood came in three seconds.

Its odor went up like hot oil.

The men shouted. They had laid their bets.

The dogs ripped at each other, detached reluctantly and with difficulty.

"G'on!"

Another man, with greenish frogskin shoes, kicked the slower dog back into the center.

The dogs rammed each other, the spade jaws trying to fasten into throats, shoulders. They rolled snarling and choking against the tilework and blood blotched the poster of the Ovaltine maiden.

The man in fur slipped his hand inside his opened coat, into a pocket which parted obligingly. He was already hard as a rock. He breathed the gladiator stink of sweat and blood, the acidic peppery exudations of human adrenaline under Faberge.

The last man at the platform's edge, standing away a little with his champagne, not liking to be splashed, saw something white below him on the line. He turned, and there was a newcomer there, standing under the platform, looking up, smiling.

"You're late," said the man above. He took in the darkness and the long, long hair. He held down his hand. "Can you make it up?"

The man with white hair took his hand, and putting hardly any pressure on it, leaped up onto the platform. An athlete. And doors not good enough for him. "Walk through the—" began the man, actually more interested in this arrival than the fight, which bored him. The white-haired man looked smiling into his face. No one else looked anywhere but at the two wrestling, bleeding dogs.

Noises of bubbling snarling, and shouts, curses, reverberated around the station, chaos of sounds.

Malach slammed his right fist into the man's body, into the spleen, which ruptured instantly. The man fell on the platform. No one saw.

The man in fur registered Malach, as Malach came close beside him.

"Pretty coat," Malach said.

"Pedigree cat," said the man. "Bred for it. Cost you a fortune." He was a little breathless, rubbing away at himself inside his trousers, not taking his eyes off the rolling mass of black and blood and teeth.

When Malach's hand come in, too, under the coat, friendly, against his side, he was startled but not displeased. He laughed under his breath, and then something unbelievable happened. He did not know—an incredible pulling, a dislocation and pain—pain—

Blood smashed outward from the wrong direction.

The other men, alerted after all, turned around.

The fur man in his coat of creatures went tumbling backward, with a great red cage stuck out from his side. Improvisation of the Viking method, if they had known it, half a spread-eagle, the ribs wrenched out and bent backward—

The sounds were different now.

Only the fighting dogs, scraping and wringing the juices from each other, did not glance to see.

The air had become an oven of roaring and blood.

Two men had grabbed Malach. He was grinning. He fell backward, pulling them with him, and as they landed on the ground he was free again. His elbows went into their breastbones and the double snap echoed up off the walls. One tried to claw after him and Malach stamped down his face like a rotten cabbage.

A small man was creeping off along the platform.

They wanted to leave it to each other, to deal with him. So now one came at him with a Buck knife.

"Here, let's be having you."

Malach dived at him, and his head slammed in under the knife-man's chin. The knife slashed, and cross-slashed over. But it was a reflex. Then the man was down, head angled impossibly, tangling Malach's legs. Malach stepped out of him, almost mincingly.

The dogs were locked now, silent. A stream of blood ran from their bodies. Blood poured from Malach's body on the left side.

The small man ran back behind him, swinging up what he had found, a sledgehammer.

It caught Malach in the .back, a blow that should have cracked him in two.

Malach bowed over, the breath going out of him in a low animal grunt, like the last noises the dogs had made.

The small man let down the hammer, which was too big for him. He prepared to crow, to the other two, the man with elephant tusk holding back his thin tail of hair, the man with the frogskin shoes.

But then Malach straightened up again, he came around like a damaged engine, slow and entirely terrible. His eyes were all white, and he reached out and smote the hammer man across the head. The stroke sent him flying, screaming, back off the platform, sheer across the rails, into the farther tunnel wall, and into the gentle body of the girl swinging from the moon, which silenced him. He dropped with a rattle on the line.

The man with the ivory band held up his open palms. The other man whimpered.

"Okay. Okay."

"Not okay," said Malach. His face looked older than the skeletons they had once dug from the plague pit under the tunnels. But he smiled again a little, as if from courtesy.

The two dogs were finished, or seemed to be. One had closed its teeth in the other's throat. Both had shut their eyes.

The frogskin man started forward, and tripped over the dogs' bodies. He fell on them. And the dying dog turned its mutilated head and tore out his throat, suddenly and silently. He had no chance to cry.

"You're terrific," said Ivory. "You're amazing."

"Yes," said Malach.

"But you'll let me go. You've had enough."

"If you like," said Malach, "you can run a little way. The exercise will do you good."

"You see," said Ivory, "even if your spine held up when that guy hit you, your ribs are caved in."

"Are they?"

"Look, here's the money from the fight." Ivory cast over a shower, not red or black now, but blue and brown. "Don't feel too great," said Ivory, "I expect."

"No," said Malach.

"That's it," said Ivory. "You have the money. Bloody dog's useless anyway."

Ivory walked along the platform, to the place of exit, which had been carefully unbarred. A dull light shone beyond, less brilliant than the torches and the warning lamps.

Malach looked at the dogs.

The dead one still had its jaws fixed into the man. The other peered up at Malach, half-blinded. It growled.

Malach coughed, and wiped the blood which came off his mouth.

Then he moved quietly out of the exit, after Ivory.

The corridors were all white tiles, like some fundamental latrine. The little dull lights burned high up, and, under them, Ivory was walking quickly now, away.

Not hearing Malach, only sensing him, he glanced back. Then he ran, not for exercise.

Malach only walked.

The white tunnels ebbed upward, and came out in a hall. More posters (Bovril, Guinness), these defaced with old naive graffiti,
Kiss me quick, Up the Spurs
.

The huge dragon-back escalators, unfurled from the upper gloom, came in motion, ascending.

Ivory had sprinted onto one. He stood, staring behind him, getting watery legs ready to run again.

Malach reached the escalators. He chose another, one which was frozen into time, like the dinosaur.

He raced. He raced up the dead escalator. And when he was above Ivory, had passed him, he vaulted the barrier between and came over on to Ivory's side, onto the moving track.

Ivory tried to go down the rocking up-escalator.

After a moment he tipped over on his knees, and the steps carried him upward again.

With no difficulty, Malach was descending.

Malach reached him.

Malach stood over him, and forced Ivory's head down onto the moving tread, so the ponytail of hair was caught inside. With a screech, Ivory was twisted around onto his side. Lying pinned, his hair in a vise, he pushed his hand up over his throat.

"Don't," he said.

Malach stood over him still, and, leisurely, once more they were carried up to the surface of hell.

When they were almost there, and the steps began to level out, Malach crushed Ivory's head over, and his face, or parts of it, were drawn into the cement with the track.

Presently, the stair mechanism jammed, but too late for Ivory.

The echoes of his anguish died slowly, as if the ancient station was unwilling to let them go.

When Malach went back below, the wounded dog, the only thing left alive, glared up at him again and growled and slavered bloody foam.