The Sword of Feimhin (25 page)

‘Normally we'd do it back at maintenance, but this one ain't for moving unless we sort her out first. We've got to take a look under her belly.' The speaker was a stout and jocular man wearing a navy peaked cap and an orange vest with grey vertical stripes. He was explaining the ropes to his teenage apprentice. The train had stopped about thirty yards down the tunnel from a Tube station, whose lights Penny could see in the distance.

She watched the emergency team that had come to fix the train blocking the tunnel, peering out through a cast-iron grill that sealed off the older tunnel she had previously discovered.

Penny had surprised herself by returning to the ghost Tube station. And she had surprised herself even more in returning to explore the tunnels so soon after her fright. Gully accused her of being addicted to it, but she didn't think she was addicted, she just knew she had to be brave;
she had to take risks if she was to discover the City Below. But this time she hadn't brought the dagger with her. This time she wasn't going to draw attention to herself with explosions of light and bangs. Even so, she still lacked the courage to explore the tunnel to the left. That was where the monster had come from – if it truly had been a monster at all and not a hallucination dredged up out of Gully's myths and her own morbid suggestibility.

If anybody was going to draw attention to themselves it was the emergency team, who were carrying inspection lamps that cast them in brilliant arcs of light, like actors highlighted on a stage. The girl apprentice had a pointy, nervous face, with short cropped dyed blonde hair. She was wearing cleanly washed overalls, with a spotless orange vest. The stout man, whose overalls were already dirty, had just taken a quick look under the front end of the driver's carriage. His voice had an archly humorous tone to it, which he was putting on for the girl. ‘It ain't just the one engine, you see. Every carriage has its own engines tucked underneath. Our job' – he said, wiping his sweating face with the back of his hand – ‘is to check it all out, see if them brushes needs changing.'

He had a grey moustache and beard that, when highlighted by the glare of his light, made it look like he had a brush right there on his chin.

Penny chuckled at the idea.

She was glad that she had found the courage to come back to the tunnels. She was thrilled to be spying on these
people – watching while they were unaware – and comforted by the calm, resigned way the maintenance people worked – it reminded her of Mother.

‘I heard,' the girl said, her voice curiously high pitched, ‘that there was a woman last week walked out onto the track.'

‘Jumped more like.'

‘When she knew the train wasn't stopping.'

‘We call them “one under”.'

‘Oh, that's creepy!'

‘It's creepy for the team that's got to scrape 'em up.'

‘You're scaring me. Don't tell me any more.'

Penny was scared too. She didn't want to hear any more about scraping people up.

She could see the expressions on their faces with exceptional clarity in the bright light of the inspection lamps. The contrast between the brilliant light on their brows and cheeks and the surrounding shadows was what painters called chiaroscuro. Maybe she would sketch their faces on her ceiling in chiaroscuro?

‘Nah – don't you worry, sweetheart! You think that's frightening? You heard the talk about the bogeyman?'

‘Don't!'

The fat man's belly wobbled as he chuckled. ‘Nothing to be frightened of.'

‘Leave it out. You'll give me nightmares.'

‘Good thing I'm down here with you, then. You'll be all right with me. But you know there's talk about it, there
are some who think he lives down here – they say he eats people alive. Honest to God! Them old tramps who kip down here. Sucks 'em up, blood and gristle, teeth and bones.'

The girl's mouth turned down. ‘Yukk!'

The fat man laughed out loud, smacking his lips. ‘Mmmmmmm!'

Penny felt a chill creep slowly over her skin from the nape of her neck and down her back. All of her newfound confidence drained right out of her. She recalled the monster she had seen in the torchlight: the vaporous cloud studded with living, talking faces. She recalled the sound of it in the dark, the slithering amoeboid movement, the faint rattling of the rusty iron grill. And then the horror of something hunting her, sniffing …

Was Gully right? Was she being crazy coming down to the tunnels again? She really had had to force herself to come back. She'd had to block out the fear in her mind at every step as she had followed the tunnel to the right, with its single set of tracks set in tarry wooden sleepers. The fact it was a single track said a lot about how old the tunnel, and the ghost station, likely was. But now she had come to the end of the right hand tunnel only to find that it terminated with a brick wall, hoary with soot and dust, surrounding the iron grill she was now peeping through. Logic dictated that she must now explore the left-hand tunnel.

You're not going to be a scaredy cat – are you?

But now the fat man was frightening her all over again with what he was saying to the girl apprentice. Penny watched, with her eyes open wide, as he clapped the shoulder of the skinny girl and laughed. ‘You know what, sweetheart? There's some who think it's the bogeyman hoovering up the place.'

Penny bit down on her quivering lower lip. He had used exactly the same word for the monster as Gully – bogeyman.

Oh, Gully!

She had never really had any friends before she met Gully. Mother did try, once or twice, to have some of her classmates around to the rambling old house, with its neglected gardens, but the noise of the children nearly gave Father a nervous breakdown.

‘
For heaven's sake, Rowena!
' he had said.

So Mother had to promise to desist from such foolishness. Penny had been secretly relieved.

When she complained, soon after that, that the other children didn't seem to like her, Father told her it was because she was special. She couldn't expect the other children to understand that because they were ordinary.

At the age of seven her mathematical skill was at the level of a seventeen or eighteen year old; she didn't know why they made such a fuss of something so simple. But that wasn't all. They did tests on her eyesight and her hearing, with electronic instruments to measure her acuities, to discover she was in the top 0.5 percentile. Penny Postlethwaite was also top of her class in science at school.
The teachers had been impressed, but they didn't really like her. It was almost as if they feared her. And the other girls and boys made rude jokes behind her back.

‘Does your mummy kiss you at Christmas?'

Penny shook her head. ‘We don't celebrate Christmas.'

But when she saw the other mothers and fathers kissing or hugging their children, she told herself that they did this kind of thing because they were ordinary, and not special like her.

They didn't have television at home because Father frowned upon the idea of celebrity and thought it was the death of culture. But Mother insisted on her Radio 3 and 4 programmes, which played classical music and operas, and gave the serious news. Art, the only subject that Penny loved, was dropped so she could focus on the sciences. She complained to Father that it was the only subject where the teacher, Miss Warren, liked her. But Father was not impressed with Miss Warren. Penny overheard the argument when Miss Warren had tried to stop the headmaster agreeing to Father's wish to stop the art class for good. Miss Warren, who was usually very quiet, so quiet she hardly raised her voice in the hour-long lesson, had shouted at the headmaster that it wasn't right, but as usual, Father had had his way. In tears, Miss Warren had later given Penny a plastic shopping bag with half-a-dozen books on art – books that had Miss Warren's own name written inside the cover – which Penny hid in the greenhouse and read over and over.

Her performance in maths and science led to her being tested for an Oxbridge University entrance when she was twelve years old. She had to sit in a room with older boys and girls and answer some trick questions, called progressive matrices. She passed the test – Father said that she had sailed through it with flying colours. He was beaming with pride as he sat her down opposite him in his ladder-backed chair.

‘For you, my girl, things are going to change.'

That night she had climbed out of bed, fully dressed, at three in the morning. She had already borrowed Mother's debit card, together with an envelope, ballpoint and postage stamp from Father's desk, cashed the maximum she could obtain from two closely located ATM machines, and posted the debit card home. In the same rebellious act she had abandoned her surname, which would be too easy to trace, and became just Penny, as she sneaked out of her bedroom window and, like the once-upon-a-time mayor, Dick Whittington, headed for London, though not on a stagecoach but the early morning train.

Now, back in the abandoned Tube tunnel, a less-than-confident Penny watched the maintenance gang getting ready to leave. A driver was climbing aboard the train. She would have to make her way back to the ghost station and head for home. She had explored the right-hand tunnel as far as it went, but it wasn't the place she was looking for.

She thought again about the left-hand tunnel. The idea
of exploring it was very frightening. She didn't know if she could do it. She'd have to go back to Our Place and think about it some more.

You're not going to be a scaredy cat, are you?