She kept screaming, turning. Nowhere to run from this. Nowhere to hide, if not here.
Another scream joined hers. Higher. A keening, grind-ing wail that did not issue from a human throat. A siren. But its significance was lost on her until she saw the specters be-gin to scatter. The newsboy raced toward a regal-looking structure and vanished inside.
An air-raid siren, then, and this was a shelter in those hellish days when the Luftwaffe crossed the Channel and the bombs rained down and the fires burned out of control.
The first explosion knocked her off her feet.
Jazz stopped screaming. She lay on her side on the tracks as dust sifted down from the ceiling, and she told her-self the impossible could not touch her. There came another thunderous roar and she felt the ground shudder, and that drove her back to her feet. She staggered toward the next splash of light. In the distance, she saw the ghost of a build-ing reduced almost to rubble, valiant walls standing like jagged, ancient ruins.
Not real, she told herself. It's not real.
But her mother's voice came back, stronger than her own. Trust your instincts, Jazz. Always.
Down deep, we've all got a little of the beast in us.
This time the voice didn't sound as though it came from inside her head but from the darkness, clear and strong as the Churchill hater's.
Jazz raced, panicked, for an exit, but nearly halfway to the other end of the abandoned station, she had nowhere to run. The siren rose and fell. Voices shouted from the dark-ness, but the sepia mirage that had appeared around her had thinned, fading.
To her right, Jazz noticed an anomaly on the wall —a round metal pipe that followed the curve of the roof and then went up through the ceiling of the tunnel. Some other sort of vent, going to the surface. But it came from the floor beneath the abandoned station, and that didn't make any sense at all. What could be deeper than this?
The air-raid siren became a whisper and then a strange electrical buzz. No, the buzz had been there all along. It came from the pipe bolted to the wall. Jazz put one hand against it and thought she could feel the slightest vibration. She glanced back the way she'd come and found herself truly alone again. With a shuddering breath, she nearly went to her knees with relief. Her ears still rang with the effects of the siren.
With no sign as to where this vent might lead, she con-tinued on her original course but against the wall now, let-ting her fingers drag along the tiles.
She saw the hole before she reached it. Tiles littered the ground where someone had shattered the wall, tearing down bricks to make a passage. Practically adjacent to one of the ventilation ducts above, the hole in the wall was bathed in light. Beyond the hole was a short passageway, at the end of which another metal door —this one painted a deep red— stood open, and Jazz could see the top of another spiral staircase leading down. This one was cast in concrete. Words had been painted on the passage's wall, faded now but readable even after so many decades had passed.
DEEP LEVEL SHELTER 7-K On the door were two posters. Jazz stepped through to peer at them. The top one featured a beautiful illustration of St. George slaying the dragon and, in large type, the declara-tion Britain Needs You at Once.
Jazz put a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out again, remembering the phantoms fleeing the air-raid siren. Britain needs me, she thought, her mind feeling frayed. She uttered a short bark that might have been a laugh.
The other poster had been torn at the top as if someone had tried to strip it from the door. The letters she could make out made it clear it had been issued by the Metropolitan something or other.
A man and four women were charged and con-victed at Great Marlborough Police Court on the 8th March, 1944, with disorderly conduct in a public Air Raid Shelter. Further, on the 13th March, 1944, at Clerkenwell Police Court, a man was sentenced to one month's imprisonment for remaining in a public Air Raid Shelter while drunk.
It is in the best interests of all that shelters should be kept respectable. Will you please assist in an endeavor to meet this end?
—C.F.S. Chappie Afraid to go on, afraid to go back, mind numb and body ex-hausted, Jazz stood and stared down that spiral staircase. The descent appealed to her. Down and down and farther down, as deep as she could burrow into the ground, where no one would ever find her. Down into the darkness to hide forever, just like Mum had told her. But without light...
Yet there was light.
"Can't be," she whispered. The bulbs in that stairwell off the main station had been a surprise enough.
But who in their right mind would keep a light burning down here?
Hands on the walls of the narrow stairwell, she started down, counting steps. Only the dimmest glow came up from below, and she felt blind. She probed with her foot before each step. The twenty-first step was broken. A piece of stone crumbled away under her heel and she slipped, one leg shooting out in front of her, hands flailing for purchase. Her head struck the steps and pain exploded in the back of her skull.
Hissing, she squeezed her eyes closed and saw a cas-cade of stars.
"Fucking hell," she muttered through clenched teeth, reaching around to gingerly touch the back of her head. She winced at the pain, and her fingers came away sticky. In the dark, her blood was black, but she knew the feel of it. She knew the rusted-metal smell of it. Jazz had become inti-mate with that odor today and would never forget it.
By the twenty-seventh step, the light had brightened considerably.
The thirty-third was the last.
At the foot of the steps, an orange power cable ran along the ground. To her right she could see several more dan-gling from the open circular vent —an answer to the mystery up above. But this was nothing official. Someone had jerry-rigged the cables, used that old vent to steal power from the surface.
Deep Level Shelter 7-K was operational, but Jazz had no idea what it was being used as shelter from. This place had never been a Tube station. It was round, just as the train tunnels were, but the way the ceiling arched in a half circle, she wondered if there was more shelter space under the floor, making up the bottom half of the circle. The tunnel might have been two hundred feet long. Work lights hung from hooks all along its length, connected by black or or-ange cables. At least half of them were out and had not been replaced. There were crates and boxes all along the walls, as well as mattresses stacked with blankets. Metal shelves and cabinets that appeared to have been part of the original de-sign lined one wall, and she could see bottles and cans of stored foods. As she moved closer, she confirmed her suspi-cions that these were not ancient supplies but far more re-cent ones. A bit dusty, but they had been put up within the last year or so.
Her gaze froze on one shelf. A trio of black heavy-duty torches were neatly lined up. She grabbed one and turned it on. Nothing. That didn't make sense. Organized people — whoever had made use of the shelter—wouldn't have the torches as backup lights without keeping batteries. She searched the rest of the shelves, then opened the nearest cabinet and found what she was looking for. An entire box of batteries.
Jazz loaded up one of the heavy torches and flicked it on. Despite the lights that already burned in the place, the bright beam thrown by the torch thrilled her. The hidden people who had used this shelter could not have rigged the entire tunnel system with lights. There would be many dark passages underground. If she meant to find her way out, far from home and the Uncles, the torch would guide her.
"Hello?" she called, suddenly nervous that the hidden people, likely thieves themselves, would attack her for thiev-ery. She feared them, but they needed blankets and torches and canned beans; therefore, they were flesh and blood. Not phantoms.