Читать книгу Tuesday Falling - S. Williams - Страница 14

There are over forty abandoned tube stations in London, some of them only a short distance from the ones that are still used, but only a few of them fit my needs.

They need to have more than one way in or out, for a start. It’s no use making a crib with no escape tunnel. When I first started living underground I holed up in an old tunnel just off Green Park: near enough to the platform to feel safe, but far enough away so as not to attract attention. There are hundreds of these tunnels in the system. Some of them are for storage, or work stations. Some connect to lines that are now redundant. Some, well some I haven’t got a scooby what they’re for. I thought the one I was bundled up in was perfect. The walls and ceiling were made up of all these little white porcelain bricks as if someone had used toy bricks to make a full-size thing. Like I felt all the time. It had an old camp bed in there and a lamp and stuff.

Compared to where I’d been living before I thought it was the Ritz.

Never occurred to me that it might still be used. I thought it was a remainder from the War or something.

Third night in and I get woken up by a workman, skimming a few hours off a ghost-shift. I don’t know who was more freaked: him or me. Anyhow, there was no back door to the tunnel, so I ended up having to bite him just to get past. Living as I was then, he must have thought I was an animal.

That was then, this is now.

After I leave the boys on the train, I walk through a service tunnel to Charing Cross, taking off my wig and stuffing it in my satchel, and putting on a baseball cap. I reverse my army shirt so it shows green rather than black, then wait until a train pulls into the station. I have a skeleton key for the emergency tail-door, which is always still in the tunnel when the train stops, so all I have to do is slip out of my alcove, climb on board, and bump it one stop to Leicester Square. Change to the Piccadilly line and ride it up to Holborn.

Little-known fact about Holborn Station is that it’s a replacement station. There’s another station almost opposite it, on the other side of Oxford Street, that closed in 1933; the British Museum Station.

You can probably guess, can’t you?

I get off the train with the other passengers, keeping my hat low and my satchel slung round my back like a haversack, its leather straps over my head but under my arms. I follow the crowd so far, then ghost through a maintenance door and slip along the running tunnel that takes me to the abandoned station. I light the way with the halogen torch I take from my satchel, and then shade through the winding chambers and connecting corridors that bring me to the air-raid shelter that was used in the Second World War.

Home sweet home.