Metro Winds (6 page)

Finally she reached the bottom, and there in an archway stood the man with the greenish-gold saxophone. She was startled to see him, but no doubt he moved about between the stations. He played a long note that strove upwards at the end, then he laid his instrument in its open case, pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and a lighter from his pocket. The flame gave his features a reddish cast as he lit it and took a deep breath, eyes half closed.

As she passed him by, some impulse made the girl fish for a coin to throw into his case. Only then did his eyes open a slit and rest momentarily on her. They were the dull sheeny colour of his saxophone. The platform beyond the arch was empty and she thought of the disused stations her aunt had mentioned. Then a man in a sleeveless singlet stepped through another of the arches. He came towards her brandishing a deformed arm that ended at the wrist and the girl wondered if he wanted money. She had a few coins in her pocket, but the man did not hold out his hand.

‘What do you want?' she asked.

‘Salvation . . .' the man said so softly she might have misheard, but he withdrew back into the shadows before she could ask him to repeat himself.

The aunt had said many troubled souls gravitated to the metro at night, trying to evade the police who would come to herd them out. One could imagine they might know the maze beneath the city better than the police, and when all of the metro doors to the outside were secured, they would creep out of their hiding places, knowing that they need fear no one except others like themselves.

She thought of the beggar woman with the pram, wondering if the enormous pot of soup had been intended to feed the metro dwellers. She seemed to see her for a moment, wheeling her pram along the platform, a gypsy woman shuffling alongside her in disintegrating slippers, clutching a baby to her chest. The old woman glanced straight at the girl with a level, questioning look which seemed to ask, ‘What are you searching for?'

The girl closed her eyes and when she opened them, there was no sign of the two women or the baby, but sitting at the edge of the platform was the black dog that she had seen before with the saxophone man. The dog turned its head to watch her approach, and gave its black tail a single flick that might or might not have been a welcome.

‘What are you waiting for?' she asked it softly, not smiling.

The metro wind gusted again and this time it smelled of the storm which must be breaking in the city overhead. The girl's hair flew forward in twin black flags and she turned her face in time to watch a train punch from the tunnel and howl past the platform. The girl glimpsed the driver looking out, his mouth opened in an O of surprise. Then she turned back to the dog, but it had gone. Before she could make anything of this, the metro train had passed without stopping, taking all of the light with it and leaving the girl standing in inky blackness. She did not move, thinking the lights would come back on, but the dark remained, settling like a dust cloth thrown over a couch.

Reaching into her pocket, the girl found the key ring with its slender torch which the aunt had given her. A narrow pencil beam of light sliced the blackness. It was too thin to be useful in such massive darkness. Without knowing why, she turned it on herself, saw the hem of her birthday dress, its winking beads and pale sequins, and wondered if Persephone had been forced to dwell six months in total darkness, or had been allowed a candle.

Turning the light away from her again, she played the narrow beam carefully back and forth to find the archway that would lead her to the escalator. She could no longer hear its asthmatic hum but it might have gone off when the lights went out. She must have gone further along the platform than she had realised, for she could not find the archway openings. She was about to turn when the light illuminated a ghostly white sign. She walked towards it, hearing how her footsteps echoed. There was an illegible word written on it, but the arrow beneath directed her clearly and authoritatively onward. Thinking there must be another part of the platform or perhaps steps that would bring her outside, she set off more briskly. The way narrowed suddenly, and seeing the graffitied wall on one side and the drop to the rails on the other, she understood that she was making her way along one of the narrow ledges that ran inside the metro tunnels.

She stopped, remembering her aunt's warning, and in the silence heard muffled laughter or screams or crying, which her footsteps must have concealed before. She felt cold and wondered if that was fear. She listened again and thought there was not one voice but a babble of them coming from behind her. She turned to face the voices and the metro wind blew so hard she rocked on her feet.

Another train? She glanced back, but turned again because now she could hear a tremendous clattering as if a herd of cows or goats were being driven along the tunnel. But the cacophony resolved into the hoof beats of a single beast, with a loud accompaniment of echoes. Something appeared in the torch beam which could not be contained or encompassed by it. The only certainties were a massive whiteness and a black eye rolling in terror. The girl staggered back against the wall and something huge passed her so closely that she felt the roughness of its pelt on her cheek and the damp heat of its fear.

A horse, she told herself, hearing it gallop away towards the platform. Or maybe a bull, but bigger than any bull or horse she had ever seen. Impossibly big. How had it come down here?

The voices were louder and now she could make out shouting and laugher and grunts and cries and shrieks and even what seemed to be discordant snatches of song. Instinctively she switched off the torch and let them come, pressing herself to the wall. In the light of dull lanterns that barely lit their faces, let alone the way ahead, she saw men and women, ragged and degenerate and shambling, some so hirsute and hunched over that they looked like beasts. As they clamoured along the passage in a narrowing stream, she thought she saw the gypsy woman she had imagined earlier pass by, her mouth open in a soundless scream. Last of all came the saxophone man carrying a great loop of rope over one shoulder and only then did it occur to her that the motley crowd were a hunting party, and the white beast that had thundered by her their quarry.

When they had passed and the noise had faded, the girl flicked on her torch and shone it after them. Her heart leapt into her throat, for there, looming in its thin stream, was the wild tormented eye of the white beast. Somehow it had evaded the rabble and doubled back. It was trembling and she sensed it was about to plunge away from her into the darkness, perhaps onto the rails below.

‘Don't,' she said.

The beast shifted uneasily but stayed as she moved closer with the torch. Its thin beam illuminated an ear pricked forward and, fleetingly, something shining and sharp. She reached out with her free hand and laid it on the coarse white coat. Powerful muscles rippled under her palm as the beast gathered itself to leap away or perhaps trample her to death. Then all at once, it became still and the violence of its terror faded.

‘Come,' the girl said, and it went with her. Now that she walked by its head, she could see it was definitely a horse, but its head was deformed. For the first time she wondered if it actually belonged to the metro denizens. It was no less a freak than they, for all its strange beauty. Perhaps she had been mistaken and they were not hunting it but trying to catch their pet. Hadn't there been a tender yearning in the eyes of the saxophone man? Even so, why should the poor beast be kept in the blackness of the metro tunnels?

Her thoughts galloped ahead and she began to run lightly to keep up with them. The beast kept pace so beautifully that it was as if they merged into one animal. The sensation was unlike anything she had ever experienced. Waves of pleasure shuddered through her, and as they ran, her hand on its hot neck, she understood that this was the thing she had sought through all the dreams and all the tunnels, this running, the hot hide under the whorls of her fingertips.

When at last they reached the platform again, she forced herself to stop so that she could look for the arches with her torch. The beast nuzzled her neck tenderly, seeming to draw her smell in, and she shivered with pleasure at the intimate touch of its nostrils on her bare skin. Then she heard the distant clamour of the hunt, if hunt it was. Instinctively she turned to the beast and bade it run, but though it shivered, it would not go. Its eyes pleaded with her. She made herself push it away roughly. It was like trying to push a mountain. She could smell the salt of its sweat.

‘I can't protect you from them!' she cried to it. ‘Run, can't you?'

But it stayed. It rested its head on her shoulder and leaned against her. The weight of the massive head forced her legs to buckle slowly, and when she had settled on the ground, the beast knelt and laid its lovely deformed head on her knees.

‘Oh you poor thing, you must go,' she murmured helplessly, shining the torch down onto it, but the violet sadness of its eyes asked only where it should go, and there was no answer to that.

Then it was too late. There was a great hullaballoo of triumph and the ragged men and women with dirt-streaked faces and crazed eyes were capering around them in the darkness, crowing with glee as they caught hold of the great white beast by its mane and tail and ears. A dozen filthy pairs of hands bore it away and brushed the girl aside without seeming to notice her when she tried to hold onto it. Or so it seemed, until one of the men, a great hulking hunchback with an ash-brown beard, looked over his shoulder at her and said with rough gentleness: ‘You found it.'

‘Will you take it out of here?' she said.

‘Up there?' the man asked, jerking his chin up contemptuously. ‘There is no place for its like up there, girl.'

She stood boneless and will-less, as they surged away and were swallowed by the dark, knowing she had stayed the beast for the crowd. Without her, they never would have caught it. Exhaustion deep as a mineshaft opened within her. A surge of the metro wind wrested the torch from her fingers. It rolled away and came to rest against the wall beside a tunnel, its beam reduced to a flickering golden egg. As the girl retrieved it, the wind blew again, gently, a mere sigh, cool and damp with the smell of the sea. She did not know what to do, but it seemed to her that she could not go back up to the city and her aunt. There was no place for creatures such as her there, either. She began to walk in the direction in which the ragged people had taken the beast, uncaring that she did not know where they were going.

The torch light gave a sepia spasm and she was again in darkness. She lifted her hand, groped for the wall, and continued on. She did not know how long she had walked except that her feet hurt. She knew she must be on one of the ledge paths again, and thought she would sit down and rest, but the salt-strong smell of the sea drew her on. The ground under her feet began to slope down and she wondered again if, deeper than the metro, there was a sea, awaiting her. If she could find her way to it, she would surely find the beast and the ragged metro people. Perhaps they had a camp of some kind and she could stay with them and help tend the beast. If it lives, whispered her heart, and oh, she knew what fear was then. There was no mistaking it.

She was still walking an hour later, or perhaps years later. In the darkness, time had become elastic and then liquid. Memories floated around her of the wind and the sea and of her solitary childhood, the way her parents had touched her so rarely. She had never wondered at this, but now it came to her that they had been afraid to touch her.

Ahead she saw a blue light and then the tunnel spilled her into what must be an immense cavern filled with ghostly phosphorescence, but if it was a cavern, then it was big enough that she could not see the walls or roof of it. She walked across pallid sand, cold and soft as powder under her feet, which the blue light turned aquamarine. Beyond it a sea stretched away and away to an invisible horizon. She walked to the edge of it and heard how the waves hissed as they unrolled at her feet. Some distance away, the narrow beach jutted out in a long pale finger, and at the very tip, through a dark jostle of people, she saw the red flare of fire. Beyond them or in their midst stood the white beast, swaying slightly to and fro, its milky coat stained red and pink by the firelight.

Stumbling with relief, she made her way along the beach and out onto the peninsula. When she was close enough to hear the fire crackling, she stopped, for the saxophone man held a knife and so did several others. They wielded them as they danced and the dance was full of stabbing and slashing.

‘No,' she choked. ‘No!'

‘There is nothing else for it,' said a voice and she turned to find the old beggar woman by her side. Her hair shone white in the ghostly light as she went on gently in her cracked voice, ‘The beasts come but they cannot stay here in the darkness and they cannot live up there. To let them go running and running in the darkness until they are blinded, until they starve or founder and fall prey to the rats would be too cruel.'