Mind the Gap

chapter Two

behind the beneath

Jazz flew down the stairs two at a time, sure that she would trip and break an ankle but unable to

stop herself. Images of her mother's brutalized corpse —and the warning she'd painted on the floor in her

own blood—flashed across her mind. But there was no going back. Over the years her mum had said a lot

about running, but one refrain echoed in Jazz's mind.



Once you start running, don't stop 'til you're well hidden.

A glance over her shoulder revealed several men de-scending after her, but they seemed in no hurry.

Still, best to be sure. To be safe. The blood on the bed and floor could so easily have been her own, and if

she slowed down it still might be, though now it would spill on the concrete stairs or tiled floor of the Tube

station.

She hit the bottom of the stairs and sidestepped a bickering middle-aged couple with three tagalong

children who huddled close to their parents, afraid of the world. Wise little ones, Jazz thought.

In her pocket she had a crumpled wad of notes —little more than forty pounds, she guessed—and

her rail pass. Hurrying toward the turnstiles, she thought of simply vault-ing them, both for speed and

because her pursuers could not be so bold. But in the fugue of grief and fear that warped her thoughts, she

knew that would attract attention she did not want. She pulled out the rail pass, stuffed her money back into

her pocket, and fed the card through the slot on the turnstile.

Get lost in a crowd, her mother's voice whispered in her head.

All of the things she had told Jazz over the years, while tucking her into bed at night or sending her

off to school in the morning, were the words of a ghost. Jazz had a ghost in her head now.

People milled about the platform, waiting for the train to arrive. The electronic sign above their heads

declared the next was three minutes away. Three minutes. Jazz glanced over her shoulder at the men who

had come onto the plat-form behind her, and she knew she did not have three min-utes. These weren't the

Uncles, but she had seen the black BMW slide by on the street above. Dressed in dark suits, they seemed

cut from the same cloth as the ugly-eyed men who had kept Jazz and her mother like pets and whose

leader had put Mum down like a sick dog.

Bile rose into the back of her throat, and she had to breathe through her mouth to keep from throwing

up. She tasted salty tears on her lips and wiped them away, plunging into the crowd of suited commuters,

snaking through them, hiding among them on the platform.

Trembling, she stopped. Eyes on the advertisements across the tracks, she tried to blend as best she

could, steady-ing her breathing. Do You Know Who You Are? one advert asked. She had no idea what it

was trying to sell, and for a second she felt the whole world bearing down on her, press-ing in from above

and all around.

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. How many times had she taken the Tube in her life?

Hundreds, surely. If she could be normal for two more minutes, pretend that all was well, perhaps she could

truly become invisible in the crowd.

She squeezed her eyes tighter, trying to hold back the tears. A dreadful mistake, for on the backs of

her eyelids she found the grotesque tableau of her mother's bedroom. She opened them wide, staring across

the tracks at the grubby tiles, the colorful advertisements, breathing too fast. The questions had begun

—who were the Uncles, really, and why had they done it? But they were not new questions to Jazz. She

had been asking versions of them for most of her life.

Someone shouted. She glanced along the platform. A mother held the hands of her two girls, twins

about six years old. An old man with long silver hair and an enormous nose leaned with great dignity upon a

cane. Beyond them, among a sea of tourists and business suits, she saw a flash of dark jacket, moving

quickly.

"Here, love." A hand landed on her shoulder. "Everything all right?"

Jazz opened her mouth to scream but no sound emerged. She stood paralyzed for a few frantic

seconds, and then she bolted to the right, toward the end of the platform. Colliding with an old biddy in a

frumpy dress, she didn't wait to apologize. A teenage boy got in her way, one hand out as though he might

try to stop her. She shot him an el-bow to the chest and kept going.

"Mad f*cking cow!" he called after her.

Her face flushed with heat as her heart thundered in her chest. She darted in and out of the crowd,

knocking over shopping bags and bumping briefcases.

"What's happening?" someone shouted.

"Who is that?"

"Don't push, don't shovel"

Jazz felt the ripples of unease spread across the platform, all originating from her. A fine way to stay

hidden, she thought, but she could not help running. She thought of shouting Bomb! but people would panic

and some would get hurt, and she could not bear that on her conscience.

She burst from the crowd to find herself alone at the end of the platform, tile walls to her right and

straight ahead and the train tracks to her left. If the Uncles really had come down here after her, they

would be on her in seconds. Her skin prickled with the attention of strangers' eyes, as though the tiles



themselves observed her.

A ledge jutted twelve inches from the wall, a lip of con-crete that continued past the end of the

platform as though the wall had not always been there. Desperation drove her forward. The cry of metal

upon metal and the screech of brakes approached from behind, and a great gust of wind blew along the

tracks. The train's arrival imminent, she put one hand on the wall and hung her head out over the tracks. In

the gloom of the tunnel, she saw that the wall went on perhaps six feet and then there was an opening

where the platform seemed to continue. In the darkness, she thought she could make out some kind of

metal grate —the sort of thing they used to partition off unused areas of the Underground.

"Here, girl, what do you think you're up to?" a voice called.

Jazz pressed herself against the wall and moved around onto the ledge. The shriek of the slowing

train grated along her spine. The light of its headlamps picked her out on the ledge as it bulleted into the

station from behind her, slow-ing, slowing...

Face sliding against filthy tiles, Jazz shuffled swiftly along the ledge, forcing herself not to imagine

falling back-ward or being blown off by the wind of the passing train. If she fell beneath it, her mother

would never forgive her.

The train hissed as it slowed, the front car coming toward the end of the platform, nearly adjacent to

her now. The conductor would see her. Someone would be called. More people would chase her into the

darkness, and then where would she hide?

Her left hand suddenly pressed against nothing. She slipped around the end of the wall onto a stretch

of for-gotten platform. On the track, the train hissed a final puff as though frustrated by her survival, and

then she heard the sounds of disgorging passengers and others climbing aboard. A recorded voice

announced the time of the next ex-pected train and advised those getting on and off to mind the gap.

It seemed she had already been forgotten.

Jazz laughed softly and without humor. Mind the gap, indeed. Never knew when you'd find yourself

falling into one of the cracks in the world. Here she was, living proof. Alice down the rabbit hole.

The train hissed again, doors closing, and started for-ward. In the light from its headlamp eyes, she

stared at the iron grating before her. Beyond it lay another stretch of platform, eight feet deep and perhaps

twenty long. A rusted, padlocked chain locked the gate. Some cinema action hero might have been able to

snap the rust-eaten chain, but not Jasmine Towne. The train rattled past, gaining speed, and with it her pulse

began to race again.

She saw the shapes of people at first, and the occasional blur of a face, but the faster it went the

more those people seemed to blur into one.

The illumination from the train's interior flickered off the black iron grate, but at the upper edge of her

vision was a rectangle of darkness that seemed to swallow the light. Jazz studied it, blinking at the

realization that either a sec-tion of the grate had been broken away or whoever had in-stalled it had left a

transom window above.

She gripped the iron bars, propped the rubber sole of one trainer against the metal, then hauled

herself up. If Jazz could be said to be gifted at anything, it was climbing. Her mother had often called her a

monkey for her love of scam-pering up trees and rocks and the way she could always manage to break into

their town house if her mum had lost her keys. She'd thought, once upon a time, of becoming a dancer. But

little girls always wanted to be ballerinas or princesses, and people like her weren't allowed dreams for very

long.

Her foot slipped, but her hands found a grip on the transom. One knee banged painfully against the

gate, rat-tling the chain and sending a shower of rust flaking to the platform. But she pulled herself up

across the bottom bar of the transom and through to the other side like a gymnast.

She landed in a crouch and paused for a moment, listen-ing to the roar of the train fading into the

distance. Light from the station reflected off the tiles on the other side of the tunnel, giving her just enough

illumination to see. Voices came from beyond the wall: bored commuters talk-ing into phones and excited

tourists nattering in a mixture of languages.

She stood frozen, like a rabbit caught in oncoming head-fights. And when someone shouted, Jazz

bolted. As the train passed, its light had shown her the outline of a tall door, and she guessed it to be an old

exit up to street level. The Underground was rife with such things, she'd read, coming up into the storage

rooms and basements of chemists, mar-kets, and pubs that had once been Tube stations or buildings

associated with them.

Dark shapes scurried and squealed around her feet: rats. As long as they ran away from her, not

toward her, she could put up with that.

The door stood open a few inches, the frame corroded. Whatever lock had once sealed it had been



broken, leaving a hole where the knob ought to be. Jazz had a strange feeling that the door had been forced

closed, not open.

She reached out. The metal felt warm to the touch and pulsed with the thrum of the Underground,

like a beating heart. Jazz leaned her weight against it, and it scraped open across the concrete floor.

Blinking, she waited for her eyes to adjust. The stairwell ought to have been pitch black, but a dim

blue glow pro-vided light enough to see that she had been wrong. The spi-ral metal staircase did not lead

toward the surface. Rather, it led deeper into the ethereal gloom.

She could go back. For a moment she considered it. But to what? The Uncles and her mother's

corpse, and the mur-derous woman with Jazz on her mind? No. There would be no going back now. If she

returned to the surface, it had to be far from here. If she got onto a train, it could not be at this station.

Somewhere in the underground labyrinth, there would be another way up.



****

The spiral staircase created an echo chamber, and the sound of her breathing surrounded her as Jazz

started down. Such evidence of her panic forced her to calm down, to slow her breath, and soon her pulse

slowed as well. Still, she heard her heartbeat much too loudly in her head.

It was at least thirty feet until the staircase ended. The blue glow brightened into silvery splashes of

light from sev-eral caged bulbs, metal-wrapped cables bolted to the curved stone walls. She wondered who

would come down here to replace these bulbs when they blew.

More hesitant now, Jazz stepped away from the bottom of the stairs and along a short tunnel. It

emerged into a vast space that made her catch her breath. Above her was a ventilation shaft that led up to

a louvered grille. Daylight filtered down, a splash of light in the false underground night. Like distant

streetlamps, other vents served the same purpose in the otherwise enduring darkness of that

long-abandoned station. The platform had been removed, and beneath her feet there was only dirt and

broken concrete. In a far-off puddle of light, a short set of steps led up to where the platform had once

been, but now they were stairs to nowhere. Without the platform, she noticed for the first time how round

the tunnels were —long cylinders bored through the city's innards.

Peering along the throat of the tunnel, past the farthest splash of light, she saw only darkness. But

somewhere down there, where the platform had once ended, there must be another door.

Jazz started in that direction, but as she moved beyond the first pool of light, the dirt and broken

ground underfoot disappeared in the dark. She moved to the tracks and crouched to place a hand on the

cold metal. Once it had been a working artery, pumping blood to the city's heart. Now it was dead. She

stepped over the rail and between the tracks. Simple enough to match her stride to the carefully placed

sleepers.

The sound of her movement echoed around her: scrap-ing stones, sharp breath, footsteps.

Walking into the darkness did not make her feel lost. A pool of light waited ahead and another

remained behind her. She could see those areas of the tunnel well enough. Yet when she looked down at

her feet she saw nothing, and even her arms seemed spectral things.

Water dripped nearby, but she could not locate its source. She studied the walls, searching for any

sign of an exit. Without a way out she wouldn't get far, at least not without a torch.

Something rustled off to her left. Jazz froze, listening for it to come again. Seconds passed before she

took another step, then she heard the sound again. Not a rustle, but a whisper. A voice in the darkness,

speaking gibberish.

"Who is it? Who's there?" she said, flinching at the sound of her own voice.

The whispering went on and, from behind her, back toward that spiral staircase, came another voice,

secretive, furtive. The Uncles or their lackeys —those dark-suited BMW men—had followed her.

"Shit," she whispered, and started moving more swiftly.

The whispers followed, but though they certainly must have seen her, no one shouted after her.

"Bloody Churchill," one of them said, but this was no whisper. She heard it clear as a bell. "Thinks

he's a general but hasn't the first idea how to fight a war. Get us all killed, he will."

A child laughed.

A burst of static filled the tunnel, followed by music —a tune she knew, something her mother had

hummed while making dinner.

Are the stars out tonight?

I don't know if it's cloudy or bright.

I only have eyes for you, dear.



Sometimes Mum sang little snippets of it, and Jazz had al-ways cherished those rare moments when

her mother seemed to steal a moment's peace, from the fear that ran through her every day, like deep

water under a frozen river. Jazz had asked her several times about the song. All but once, Mum had

seemed not to know what she was talking about. That once, she'd relented.

"Was a time your father sang it to me, and meant every word," she said. She never spoke of it again.

Churchill? What was that about? The music crackled, a tinny echo, as though it came from some

old-time radio. Someone was down here in the tunnel with her, but it wasn't the Uncles or their other BMW

men.

The song continued to play, but the child's laugh did not come again.

Hope and dread warred within her. Whoever lurked in the tunnel could point her way out, if they

weren't mad as a hatter. But that business about Churchill pricked at her mind, and the memory of that

voice seeped down her spine.

Retreat not an option, she went on, peering into the darkness for a face. The radio crackled again

and other whispers joined in. Jazz's breath caught. How many people were down here? She caught a few

snatches of words, but nothing that made any sense. What had she discovered, some sort of subterranean

enclave?

"Sir?" a voice called. "Paper, sir?"

Before she turned, in that singular moment, she under-stood something that had been niggling at the

back of her mind. The laughter, the voices, even the music... they made no echo. The tiles did not throw the

sounds back at her.

Her skin prickled as she turned and saw the boy in his cap and jacket, the shape of him more a

suggestion in the dark, a fold in the air. He held something out, a newspaper, as if to some passerby. But no

one else was there. He did not seem to have noticed Jazz at all.

She backed up, caught her foot on the rail, and sprawled on her ass.

When she sat up, breath hitching, shaking in confusion, the ghost had gone. For what else could it

have been? Hal-lucination or phantom: those were really the only choices, and she feared madness more

than haunting.

The music and whispering had stopped.

Jazz stood and stepped carefully back between the tracks. With a quick glance at the spot where

she'd seen the darkness form its lines and shadows into a shape, she hurried on, wondering if the whole day

might be some kind of breakdown, a series of waking nightmares. What if she was sitting in her bedroom

right now, or in a hospital, and none of what she had seen was real?

The thought brought the threat of tears, and she bit her lower lip. The rail glistened with weak light

that filtered down the vent shaft ahead. The dripping noise remained, and from far above she could hear car

horns and the roar of engines. She moved into the pool of daylight, and it made her wonder just how dark it

would become down here when night fell.

She glanced around, searching for an exit. Again, as she had back on the station platform, she felt the

burden of strangers' eyes upon her. Twisting, she peered back the way she'd come, but there were no signs

of anyone there.

Taking a breath, she started into the darkness again, hur-rying toward the next shaft of light.

Focusing only on her footing, she stepped from sleeper to sleeper, catching the glint of the rails just enough

to avoid stumbling over them.

The key's in adapting, her mother's voice muttered in her head. Remember, they can't find you if

you can't find yourself.

That particular comment had been made while out shopping for a winter coat, the day Mum had

bought her the red one with the fur-fringed hood. It hung in her closet now, and would forever, until

someone packed it up with the rest of her things and it vanished into another closet or some charity shop.

Jazz swallowed but found that her throat had gone dry. Mum spoke to her from the surface world,

from the life that had ended just an hour ago. How much might be memory and how much her own

imagination, she did not want to know.

Perhaps she'd become just another ghost in the Underground.

"How'm I doing, Mum? Lost enough?" Jazz said aloud, her voice quavering, the echo soft.

Halfway to the next splash of light, the whispers began again. The Churchill hater spoke up, so

close. Too close. Jazz spun around, crouched down, and now the walls she had built to keep out the fear

gave way and it crashed in around her, drowning her. Her eyes searched the tunnel for ghosts.

"Where are you? What the hell are you doing here?" she cried into the darkness.

A horn beeped loudly behind her.



Jazz spun and saw the car coming at her along the tracks. On instinct, she threw herself to one side.

But the car existed only as a shade —a pale, translucent image. As it passed, she heard the engine buzz in

her ears, but the tunnel did not echo the sound.

A cacophony of sound erupted around her. Voices, Cars. The music started up again, crackling radio

static. "Pennies from Heaven" this time. The newsboy hawked papers. And as she spun, eyes wide, body

shaking with the influx of the impossible, the tunnel came alive with faded images. Gas lamps burned on

street corners, and she saw the city unfold around her. London —but not the London she knew. The

clothes were of another era. The Churchill hater stood out-side a pub, blustering drunkenly at another man;

couples walked arm in arm, the men in suits and the ladies in dresses.

The ghosts of London.

All she could do to escape was close her eyes, but when she squeezed them shut, an all too earthly

image slashed across her mind instead.

No escape.

Jazz screamed, and when she ran out of breath, she in-haled and screamed again. And when she

finally opened her eyes, the ghosts were still there. On one corner stood a man in an elegant tuxedo, top hat,

and white gloves. He fanned a deck of cards to an unseen audience the way the newsboy had offered his

papers to invisible passersby. With his right hand he drew out a single card, and her eyes followed that card

for only an instant but long enough for the rest of the deck to vanish. He opened his arms as if to welcome

ap-plause, and doves appeared in his hands, spectral wings tak-ing flight. The birds vanished when they

reached the roof of the tunnel, passing through as if by some other illusion.

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.

"F*cking 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.

"Anyone here? Hello?"

Her only answer was the echo of her own voice.

Jazz glanced around again and wondered what these people had run from, why they were hiding, and

if they meant to hide forever.

"Mum," she whispered, hidden away far beneath the city. Her tears began to flow and she put a hand

over her eyes. At last the fear that had driven her gave way to grief.

"Oh, Christ. Mum."

Shaking with exhaustion now that adrenaline had left her, mind awhirl with mourning and ghosts and

hopeless-ness, she made it to the nearest mattress and collapsed there. Jazz held the torch like a teddy,

drew a blanket over herself, and pulled her knees up tight, as she did on the coldest win-ter nights.

In silence, buried in the grave of another era, she cried for her mother and herself.