The Sword of Feimhin (22 page)

Pausing within the entrance of the deserted Tube station, Penny listened carefully, paying attention not just to what sounds she might hear, but also to sounds that were different from what she might expect to hear.

Listen carefully – then listen carefully again!

She was alert for the absolute silence that would tell her if the animals, who had eyes and ears even better than her own, had detected an unwelcome presence.

She had discovered the ghost Tube station on one of her trips to Piccadilly Circus. There she would admire and sketch from different angles and in different levels of light. On several occasions, at dusk, she had seen bats emerging from a cleft in the soot-stained stone wall of the station. They had wheeled and skimmed through the narrow deserted side street, heading for the huge open space with its mighty lions a hundred yards riverwards. But bats didn't make nests in clefts, they had to get inside and roost in the
spaces that would let them fall into flight. There had to be a way in through the cleft.

It involved a bit of a climb. She had to tie her trainers around her neck and carry the dagger in Gully's old denim backpack, first making sure the stitching would take the weight and that the box would fit. It also meant breaking her promise to Gully, but that had only been half a promise, the sort you were only half obliged to keep. And although she had never climbed a sooty old wall like this before, she was confident she could climb it with ease by inserting the tips of her fingers and toes into the cracks where the mortar had decayed. Inside she found a cluster of thick black cables snaking down the cobwebby walls, supported at intervals, by iron brackets. These ran conveniently down the walls and into a box-like enclosure on the floor. Within seconds she was landing in thick dust in the station atrium.

‘
Don't you do nuffink stupid, gel!
'

She pictured Gully's brown eyes looking up at her on the gantry, through the thick eyebrows that were like knotted string.

‘No more broken arms – I promise!'

There was no hurry, now that she was in.

He had tried to dissuade her from exploring the Tube tunnels. ‘
People's talkin' about something goin' about killin' people. Honest to God, Penny. There's some kind of bogeyman roaming about down there
.'

‘Bogeyman?' She couldn't help laughing.

Gully didn't like her to talk about the City Below. He
didn't understand it and that was why it frightened him. And now he was trying to frighten her, trying to stop her exploring by talking about monsters.

Penny didn't take Gully's fears seriously. He was very superstitious: OCD, plus plus plus. That was why he carried a watch on each wrist and carried his stuff in strictly different pockets, and why he touched wood and counted to twenty when worried. His upbringing had done that to him: his druggie mum and dad, and the demon drink. But underneath the OCD, Gully was smart. He was street smart. He was a survivor. And he liked to think that he took care of her. He liked to think that she wasn't street smart enough, that she needed him to look out for her.

She felt guilty about breaking her promise to Gully, even if it was only a half-meant promise. She had even thought about telling him where she was going, but she just hadn't been able to do it.

No telling. No touching
.

‘
You stay here
,' she had insisted instead. ‘
You stay here and take good care of your pigeons
.'

And now she was picking up faint rustling and a distant, very soft ticking: the deathwatch beetles in the timbers overhead. All the while she was standing still and listening carefully, her eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom. It wasn't pitch-dark; there was a trickle of light coming in through dust-grimed windows set high in the walls. Nevertheless, she would have to use the torch. Slipping the backpack off her shoulders she popped open
the side pocket and took it out. She checked the torch with a quick flick of the switch. How piercingly bright it was! So bright she waited a minute or two longer, worrying if it was safe to use it. Then she thought of a trick that Gully had taught her and she wrapped the torch in a piece of tissue she would otherwise have used to blow her nose.

It worked.

The light from the tissue-covered torch was much less bright, yet still enough for her to make out her surroundings.

She was standing in what had been the Tube station entrance. It was much pokier than she would have expected. The lower half of the walls were tiled in a creamy white, streaked in places by a rusty brown. Lines of tiles, the colour artists called Pompeii red, broke up the creamy monotony into oblongs and diagonals. Ahead of her was a winding staircase of grimy steps that led downwards in a spiral. She was inhaling dust with every breath; it painted every horizontal surface and powdered the murky dome of ceiling. On the staircase she read fading letters painted into the plaster above the tiles – TO THE TRAINS – a somewhat unnecessary instruction accompanied by an equally unnecessary long slim arrow that pointed downwards.

There would be no trains today. There had been no trains through here for tens of years.

Placing the torch, still wrapped in the tissue, on the dusty floor at the top of the stairs, she opened the main pocket of the backpack and lifted out the heavy dagger,
still safely secured within its box. Hugging the heavy object to her breast, she thought about what she was doing. She closed her eyes.

Was it her imagination or could she feel a slight vibration from within the box? She placed the question mark shape of her ear against the lid.

I do feel it! As if it were calling me
.

All the time she had been drawing the labyrinth over the ceiling – making sure the streets were at the right angles to one another, that the landmarks of the great city were each in their exact place, drawn with a perfect accuracy from the elevation that she most liked to draw it – she had been certain that there was a purpose in it. She knew that, she had sensed it absolutely, even though its purpose had been clouded in mystery. Solving the mystery that lay hidden within the labyrinth, that was the key to everything. And when she had first seen the Scalpie's dagger, with its strange spiral blade and the glowing symbol in the hilt, she knew that it was a vital clue. All that had happened – including the arrival of the alien man and woman – had been an integral part of the plan. She had seen the identical jet-black triangles in their brows. She had been thrilled to look deeper into the pulsating arabesques within them, knowing she was gazing through tiny windows into their alien minds.

That sense of revelation had been confirmed by the ease with which Mark had destroyed the Scalpie. And it had been further confirmed when Nan had destroyed the
Grimlings without needing a weapon. It was as if she had simply thought them dead and the crystal window in her brow had made it happen.

Like magic!

The strangeness of that! The wonder of it! The fact she had been drawn into it as their guide! And then the dagger just falling at her feet …

That the dagger was both mysterious and powerful, she had no doubt, but she also sensed, strongly and absolutely, that she mustn't attempt to hold it by the hilt. It was why she had brought the heavy glove Gully sometimes used to hold troublesome pigeons. For the moment she refused to hold the dagger, even when using the glove. She figured that if she just kept it at a slight distance, if she kept it within its box, it would lead her to what was calling her. Only then would she understand the powerful sense of destiny that was troubling her in every waking moment and tormenting her sleep. She would discover the City Below. This would enable her to put the two halves of the great mystery together – the linking truths that made an extraordinary whole of the labyrinth: the City Above and the City below. She would discover whatever part she was destined to play in this extraordinary mystery.

She returned the dagger to the backpack and picked up the shaded torch, then descended the dust-caked staircase and stopped on a landing with a claustrophobic cluster of rooms. In one of them there was a toilet, with a broken wooden cover, and two sinks side-by-side and black with
dirt. She could hear water running down the walls and dripping onto the floor somewhere to her left. The ammonia stink of decades of bat droppings was almost unbearable. A small head was poking out of a hole in the floor immediately ahead of her. It was twisting around, like a glove puppet, sniffing at the air. It was a rat, although for a moment, she imagined that it was a Grimling.

Fright was making her imagination run away with her. She readjusted the heavy backpack to make it more comfortable, and listened carefully again for anything out of the ordinary. Her footsteps were the only sound.

As she moved through the rooms, she found an even narrower tunnel, so narrow her shoulders almost brushed against the walls as she walked through it. It followed several acute bends, until she came to some cast iron signs in lime green that were rust-speckled but still perfectly legible: BEWARE – ELECTRICITY. BEWARE – TRAINS. She chuckled again. The electricity she understood, but why would anybody descending into a tiny Tube station need to beware the trains? Surely they knew to beware the trains? Even as she pondered the incongruity she saw, through the gloom ahead, the unmistakable dark mouth of a tunnel. It was on the other side of a rusted steel mesh fence enclosing a padlocked, ironwork door. A long dead pigeon, rotted to bones and a couple of feathers, poked out of the claggy dirt inside the gate.

She tested the padlock.

It looked as old as the station itself, but it was large and
forged out of solid steel. Pulling at it and shaking the ironwork door only raised clouds of dust and made too much noise.

Penny slid the backpack to the floor again, took out the box and opened the lid. Donning the heavy leather glove, she stared for several seconds at the dagger, its triple infinity sigil glowing like a silver jewel embedded into the hilt. She took the tissue off the torch so it provided some light when she placed it on the ground, then she closed her gloved hand around the hilt of the dagger.

A tingling sensation travelled through her hand, making the muscles cramp up hard. Sweat erupted on her brow and she panted for several moments, waiting for her heartbeat to normalise. The dagger was too heavy for her to lift with one hand. She gripped it tightly with her gloved left hand, then wound the fingers of her right hand around the glove so she could two-handedly lift it out of the box. Blinking her eyes to try to clear the sweat, she struck the padlock with the spiral blade.

There was a brilliant flash of light.

She blinked furiously, half blinded by the glare, then urged herself on before her courage failed her.

You have to do it again! Do it, right now!

She struck out again, clenching her eyes shut as the heavy blade made contact with the hook of the padlock. She saw the glare even through her clenched lids and heard a sharp explosive crack, loud as a gunshot. For the briefest moment, in the illumination of the glare, she thought she
saw something very strange, something as huge as a train carriage in the tunnel to the left. She was so shocked she dropped the dagger and heard it clang against the dusty floor. When she opened her eyes again the padlock dangled brokenly from the door, its hook snapped in two, with the fractured ends blue-black as if they had been scorched.

With her heart in her throat Penny retrieved the dagger, her left hand juddering even within the steadying support of her right, and placed it back in its box. She was shaking so badly she couldn't close the lid; she left it open, with the dagger and its symbol glowing within. The trembling threatened to spread and engulf her entire being. She copied Gully's mantra and made herself count to twenty. She closed the lid, clumsily forced the box back into the backpack, then held the bundle against her breast.

Oh, God – Oh lord!

Had she imagined it?

She didn't know what to think. She felt for her claws only to realise she hadn't brought them. The torch was still shining in the dust-carpeted floor. Now she clutched at it, clumsily, hitting the floor and scraping the skin off her knuckles in her haste. She flicked off the light, then she just stood there, not daring to move, struggling to think.

*

She heard her father's voice, speaking clearly and calmly in her head. ‘
There is always an element of logic to any situation. What we have to do, what we were put on this Earth to do, is to follow that logic to its natural conclusion
.'

It was one of those times when Father had invited her into his study. She liked to think of it as his brown study. It had a brown desk and wooden chair with brown leather upholstery and straight ladder back – the chair of reason she had come to label it – in which she would sit opposite him and be instructed on how to follow the thread of logic to its natural conclusion. After these lessons in the brown study she would ask his permission to go out into the garden. She would make straight for the summer house. Neither Father nor Mother liked to sit in the garden and so she knew she would be alone. When she needed most desperately to think, she imagined herself back in the summer house. She imagined herself there now and pondered the direction that the element of logic was pointing her in.

I saw something
.

She thought back to Gully's warning. Could Gully be right? Was it Gully's monster she had glimpsed in the flash of light? An amorphous thing that moved like a giant amoeba through the tunnels, hunting for prey – hunting for people? A ghoul that devoured people, that ate them alive?

No! It couldn't be. Such things were impossible.

But then why was she so frightened?

Stop, look, listen!

Penny did so. And she thought she heard something: a slithering movement followed by a faint rattling of the rusty iron grill. Then a pause, as if something were … were
testing, peering in through the grill, already aware of her footprints in the dust, sniffing, trying to catch her scent.