ONE

It takes a moment for our eyes to adjust. After the initial sharp glare and the moments blinking, we see a white rectangle hanging in the blackness. We use the rare opportunity of light to glance at the faces of those around us. It takes a moment (they are grey and weary) but we come to recognise them as the people we have known deeply in these seven days underground. Seeing their faces again calms us, but we don’t look at them for long; what we are being shown is important. And it is white. So intense after our long age in the dark. Surely white is the colour of hope.

We sit forward, listening to the tense hush as each person restricts their breath to the absolute minimum. This bright projection seems fragile-a puff of air and it will be gone. Our heavy silence holds it in place and the tension presses us against our seats. We stare at the blank white rectangle.

Only, it’s not actually blank. Maybe our eyes have adjusted, or perhaps the image was slowly pulled into focus. We can’t tell. Either way, there is now a dense, short-pile texture. Pristine fibres woven tightly form this blank canvas.

The picture pans down slowly and we are shown the first brushstroke. Red, one crimson fleck. Then another.

As if sensing our instinctive alarm, the picture moves more quickly. More flecks appear, and more and more, until fine-spray detail washes into broad strokes. Up until now, these red flecks and streaks have been random, but as the picture zooms out we can see the terrible pattern they create. There is art in this fury.

The blood (let’s not kid ourselves, we knew it was blood from the start) is thrown from a central point, somewhere just beyond our field of view. Deep red near the point of origin, flashing brighter at the edges. The picture moves down again and we get our first view of something solid; a thick, blackish substance that looks like tar, though we know it is organic matter. So much blood now that the carpet is saturated. It glistens. And there is more organic matter; something grey and fatty. We are shown more; one shocking shard of white that can only be a splinter of bone.

We all seem to notice the next detail at the same time because the silence is broken by a collective intake of breath. There is a hair. Long and fine. We cannot tell its colour because of the blood. The presence of this hair deeply troubles us. Why this hair seems more disturbing than anything else is hard to tell. Perhaps it makes the blood real.

There is a moment to wonder if this is a dream, or some kind of collective hallucination- god knows we’ve been cooped up so long together it would make sense for us to finally flip out. We look again to our friends, to see our own shock reflected on their faces. 

Sudden movement captures our attention again; the picture rapidly zooms out, and it shows us everything.

She used to be an angel, we can see that much. Surrounded by a halo of gore, the little girl has cherubic proportions – chubby limbs, small body, such tiny plump fingers. She is wearing what looks to be a school uniform; a pleated skirt, a blouse that used to be white. She could be four years old, or six, or seven. There is nothing left of her face. The ejected blood and bone and gristle radiate from the place where her head should be. At her shoulders is a raw mess of tissue like shredded meat.

We need some time to compose ourselves (someone close to us, possibly the boy, possibly Clara, is quietly sobbing) but no time is granted. As soon as we think of her pain, her poor little- as soon as these thoughts occur, we see movement.

There is a shadow in this picture, and it moves. It is perhaps not surprising that we didn’t see it before, but now that we do, it seems so obvious. We can see his shadow, can see it moving with his every ragged breath. And then we see him. Lank hair, broad shoulders, his rough hands dripping with blood. He moves closer and his shadow falls upon her.

Our perspective moves swiftly to get a close-up of his face, but some darkness obscures it from us. We get the vague impression of his features, nothing else. High forehead, blunt cheekbones. Eyes that reflect no light.

Before the picture leaves us, there is one thing more. Right on cue, sound fades in. It is another dimension and it startles us, although it consists of perfectly ordinary sounds; ambient street-noise, light rain against windows, a distant fox calling to the night. And something else, a constant tone that we don’t recognise straight away. And his laboured breathing on top. We hear the metallic rasp of him zipping up his fly.

“My angel,” he says, and the darkness returns.

Surely darkness is the absence of hope.

TWO

The beginning and the end were housed in a corrugated shed in a leafy suburb of London. Nestled in a valley of woods and parks and family homes, the building was grey and nondescript. Only the traintracks leading up to the shed gave a clue of its purpose. Inside the shed, on a morning with winter’s early bite in the air, was a man called Pat and a train called Betty. 

Betty was condemned. She was old; part of the 1976 rolling stock. Serviced the Jubilee line for 36 hard years. A refurbishment in the 80s was meant to add another forty years to her, but the unprecedented numbers of passengers and journeys had taken their toll. Part of the 80s refurb had been to remove the need for a driver; now she’s handled by a computer housed in Greenwich, with only minor adjustments made by human operators to account for events the computer can’t predict with any accuracy; the weather, human error on other lines, suicides.

Other engineers didn’t like Betty. It wasn’t her age, or the way her sump valve constantly leaked. In fact, there was no tangible, measurable cause for their unease. At least, none that they had been made aware of. But they’d all noticed the way she’d sit quiet in the drafty sheds, anonymous and brooding. People make faces out of almost everything, and Betty’s features of grills, lamps and windows were, on paper, exactly like her sisters. But as the slanted light speared down from the high, grimed windows of the shed, it seemed to find a unique meanness in her. Betty was an old pull-horse, and a dark one.

So no-one but Pat Fields was there to wipe her down, to whisper a small thank you as she embarked on her last journey before being shuttled to the depot to be torn apart. Her hull itself had already been bought by a syndicate, to house a pop-up restaurant in Shoreditch that would serve artichoke jelly and calf’s liver tartare and people would come and say what an amazing idea it was, how retro-cool, and they wouldn’t think at all of what had happened inside those carriages; the minor tragedies, the little victories, the hopes and fears and long tired hours, the rushed mornings, the intoxicated nights, the sweat and tears and blood and vomit, the time-worn ghosts of a million journeys. 

Some of the engines had names, other’s didn’t. Pat was the one that had named Betty, after his daughter’s grey rabbit, who had a tendency to nip and bite. He had tried to like the little rabbit, offering it a variety of vegetables and attempting to find a sweet-spot where she might actually like to be stroked; the belly, under the chin, behind the ears. But the rabbit was stubborn and it bit him and it often drew blood. And the next morning he would be out there in his dressing-gown, pushing thin batons of carrot through the cage, making the small “tch, tch” sounds that we use to calm small creatures. His daughter was somehow never bitten and she would hold the rabbit in her arms and put silly doll-hats on it and demand that he take pictures of them. The rabbit died, and his daughter didn’t cry, and things had changed and moved on and she had grown up and grown distant, and Pat guessed that she never thought of her rabbit at all anymore. There was a thin, white line of raised tissue on his finger that was a reminder of the rabbit’s sharp teeth, just above the thin, white band that marked the absence of his wedding ring. Both were sometimes tender, especially on cold winter mornings, feeling like the unprotected skin when you cut your nails too short. They were both scars.

Now, in the non-descript shed, with his breath clouding out in front of him, Pat went through the safety checklist, testing and probing Betty’s inner workings. He felt a shiver as he touched her, a frosty shudder as he tightened screws and replaced blown fuses, and he marked it down to his own advancing years. Just like the crick in his neck and the way it took his hands an hour longer than the rest of him to wake up in the morning, these strange feelings were nothing to worry about.

Had Pat been privy to Betty’s stats, he might not have volunteered to oversee Betty’s last journey and he may have thought twice about the feeling of empty dread in the pit of his stomach. The Department for Transport does not publish journey statistics for individual engines, for fear the drivers (or worse, the public) would read them and find superstition in them. Had he been given clearance, Pat would have noticed something strange as soon as he opened the filing cabinets, because whilst most of the files were a uniform size and shape, the paperwork for 69-AC spilled over to two folders, each two inches thick. Taking the papers to the desk, he’d skip past the maintenance entries and find the “Significant Incidents” section, which made up the bulk of the files. There’d be a list. A long list. Had Pat McGree seen this list, he might well have set his mouth into a smile of cold recognition; Betty had a tendency to bite, and she often drew blood. She had been the instrument of over ninety suicides. Pat would have been sure that was well above average. Reading more, he’d see she had also been the venue for six hundred petty crimes, four knife-attacks and twelve heart-attacks. On one evening in 1986, she had held a nineteen year-old girl captive while a gang of four males attacked and raped her. In 1993, a bag was found in her rear carriage; it contained the skulls and thighbones of four children. Experts estimated that children were between three and five years old and no one ever found out who they were.

Pat attached a nozzle into Betty’s inlet and flicked on the pump. Twenty gallons of engine oil were sucked and slurped down every second. Pat thought how guttural, how like an animal, the sound was.

Pat went to the sink next to the rows of workbenches and used the industrial soap to remove most of the grease, but no matter how hard he scrubbed, there was always a line of dirt around his fingernails. He dried his hands, relishing the warmth that he was rubbing in. He glanced over his shoulder, and saw an image of himself, caught in Betty’s window. Reflected in her lens, he became ancient, a husk of a man. Betty showed him the thin parchment of his skin, the sallow folds of his neck, the low stoop of his shoulders and Pat turned away from the sight.

So Pat was old, and on his way out, and Betty was old and she was condemned. But they had one last journey to make. He pressed the button to open the shed doors and morning light spilled in over them both and Betty’s dark interior was not illuminated at all.

THREE

Twenty minutes after Pat closes the door and fires Betty up, twenty minutes into his strange, last journey, Mickey Breeze is standing outside Wood Green tube station.

If Mickey’s life was a movie then the policeman watching him from through the window of his car would have sensed something wrong; something strange about Mickey’s rigid stance, the too-blank look on his face, the hard way his hand grips on the carry-all at his side. The policeman throws open the door, sprints across the busy pavement, maybe knocking an overweight commuter sprawling before tackling Mickey to the floor. The policeman shouts for his partner, who is already striding towards them. From somewhere unseen, pounding electronic bass music booms. Mickey’s arms are drawn tight against his back. The second policeman’s hands rifling through the bag, finding the stock, the bundled currency. A flash-cut to Mickey sitting in the back of the police car, handcuffed and sore. Close-up on the sweat trickling down his face, the anger and regret.

But Mickey’s life is not a movie. Thank fuck. So he doesn’t stand too rigid. He doesn’t grip too hard on the bag and there is life in his face. He’s an old pro, and whilst kids might be cheaper and oh-so-easy to recruit, he has a perfect record; he has never been caught. This has earned him considerable trust. The traffic-light turns green and the police car inches forward. The policeman doesn’t even catch his eye as the car drives off. He’s free to finish his cigarette.

Before leaving the pick-up, he had sampled just enough of the stock to check its strength. This tester has heightened his senses, sharpening what were already keen blades. He doesn’t allow the anticipation of success to dull his judgment, but Spencer does give himself a second to visualise it; at the drop-off he can get his money, get a proper hit and relax. Cash, needle and tranquility. Then he might get one of Don’s girls downstairs to wank him off- he’ll ask her to do it like his first girlfriend used to; excruciatingly slowly.

But for now, he watches everyone, while no-one watches him. He had the good fortune to be born with one of those faces that people just skip over. Brown eyes, plain features. No distinguishing marks. He moves slowly and the cruelty in him is well hidden.

Glancing at the electronic timetable, Mickey takes a coin from his pocket and dances it across his fingers. He makes a few passes, palming the coin from left to right, never once looking at the quick work his fingers are performing. He likes the delicate weight of it in his hands. He notices a small boy – red trousers, big blue sweater with a seagull motif, open, honest face - watching his tricks. Mickey begins flipping the coin high into the air, still not needing to watch what he’s doing. The boy’s eyes widen; he must think he’s watching magic. Higher and higher the coin tumbles. During the routine he glances at the timetable again and sees that he should make a move if he wants to get the next southbound Piccadilly. He makes a final flourish, feinting that the coin is spinning to its highest arc, but all the while it’s sitting securely in his palm. He winks at the boy, then spins around to join the queue for the escalators.

And by a stroke of luck, he’s picked the perfect moment to get in behind a pretty blonde. He watches her all the way down the escalator, getting a thrill from simply being both above and behind her. If Mickey could be both above and behind everyone, he would be. He gets as close to her as he dares, which is a familiar yet always pleasing game, and he discreetly inhales the sweet, nutty perfume of her hair.

At the bottom of the escalator, just as he is about to take the turn onto his platform, his mask slips for a moment. Some fucking tramp is sat there. Stinking rags and pleading eyes. The tramp reaches out a plastic cup for spare change, not even having the courtesy to ask politely, probably not even able to speak English. This dirty hand brushes past Mickey’s bag and he stops dead in his tracks. Without bothering to look back, he kicks out, hitting the cup of change out of the tramp’s grasp. Meagre copper coins splash to the floor and roll away. Although he knows he shouldn’t have let the mask slip, he walks on, confident that no-one will reprimand him, nor will they stop to help. He knows that people don’t care about each other. It’s what makes his life so easy.

As if waiting just for him, the tube train pulls up as soon as he arrives at the end of the platform. He scans the interior, satisfies himself that no-one inside is watching him. A few people get on after him, but they’re safe too. Mickey is the lone wolf on this carriage.

He is lucky enough to have caught the train with the pretty blond inside. He’ll enjoy stealing glances at her, each time looking away just as she starts to feel uncomfortable.

Putting his cargo between his feet where he can protect it, he looks at his reflection in the window opposite. There is the briefest lick of fear when he thinks of where he has to take his package, of what he will have to do to make the drop-off go smoothly, but he quickly gains control. This is just another job. He has never been caught. He is invisible. He loves the way the mask slips back on so easily; trepidation turning to confidence the way a coin can be flipped to show its opposite face.

The tube door whooshes shut and Mickey closes his eyes for a moment. He thinks he is safe.

FOUR

“It’s getting bigger” Anne said, staring out of the kitchen window to the crabby patch of lawn, and the hole that was growing there.

“What?”

“I said, it’s growing.”

“Growing?” George, asked.

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

A flicker of doubt across George’s face. “Holes don’t grow dear. The expand, they get bigger. They don’t grow.”

Anne bit down against a bitter reply.

She did not hate her husband. No, it was more subtle than that. There were still his flashes of humour and wit and the (now far too infrequent) looks of passion that got her all stirred up. She could not have stayed with him otherwise. And there was little Alan to consider as well, and he was no small measure when she came to weigh up her decisions. But a lot of the time, most of the time even, she felt nothing for George but a sense of careworn fellowship. They were middle-aged now, and they had shared so much, and the little tendernesses they gave each other were just about enough to keep them going.

But in the garden a dark mouth was opening.

Anne had seen the hole first, had thought it a rat-hole, a nasty little place for a nasty little creature, and she had forbidden Alan, who was only six and stuffed to the seams with boyish curiosity, to go near it. He might put his hands down there and get – ugh – bitten. She had instructed Georg to fill it in. Just as she had instructed him to re-seed the lawn and fix the hinge on the shed door, like she’d instructed him to change the lightbulb in the small bathroom and to keep his work boots of the coffee table. And then something had changed. She’d been hanging out the washing under a leaden sky that warned of rain before lunchtime, and she had almost stepped into the hole. In the moments after, she had been thrust back in memory to her uncle’s farm in Tiverton, in the back-field, a bastardly place of scrub and sharp stones. Only Flock, an old grey with a whiskered muzzle and low-slung back, could graze there, on account of his hardy stomach and pedestrian pace. His long eyelashes had turned white the previous winter, and now his tail was turning too. Flock had been grazing and maybe he was startled by something, a mouse, perhaps a fox, and he must have picked up some speed because he’d been canting, coming close to a gallop and suddenly his whole front angled towards the ground and he collapsed, screaming high womanish screams. His front leg had plunged into a sneaky patch of earth that gave way to a hole fully three-feet deep. His leg had snapped. Anne could see it splintering through his skin, and the vivid blood that hit the earth and turned black. Flock’s back legs scrabbled around in the dirt and his wild eye could find no focus; it settled briefly on her face and then wheeled to the sky as if searching for the god that had struck him down. His breath came in heavy bellows and he squirted urine everywhere and Anne could smell the panic in it. And then her uncle had come, and put his hands over her eyes and had led her back to the house. His hands had smelled of orange soap. Then he’d gone somewhere else, most likely the big shed in the yard out front, because when he walked back around the house where Anne could see him through the kitchen window, he was holding a rifle slung over his forearm. Anne hastily ran a glass of water and took a sip, more for something to do with her hands than for anything else. It was cold, but gave her no refreshment. Her uncle had stiffly cocked his rifle and was now standing over Flock. He raised the gun and fired. Thunder rolled towards her and she closed her eyes, and even so, the water in Anne’s glass didn’t even tremble.

And now this hole.

In her garden.

Growing.