Mind the Gap Read online

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  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. Its not real.

  But her mothers voice came back, stronger than her own. Trust your instincts, Jazz. Always.

  Down deep, weve all got a little of the beast in us.

  This time the voice didnt sound as though it came from inside her head but from the darkness, clear and strong as the Churchill haters.

  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 didnt 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 shed 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 passages 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 months 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.

  "Cant 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 didnt make sense. Organized people — whoever had made use of the shelter—wouldnt 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 c
ity. 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.

  Chapter Three

  flesh and blood

  Her dead mothers whispering woke her up.

  Jazz jerked upright, and for a few seconds she thought she was still dreaming. She was surrounded by a pressing darkness, lessened here and there by dusty bulbs hanging suspended from a high ceiling, and if shed been in her bed-room, shed be looking at a movie poster of Johnny Depp. Instead, the poster that hung on the rough brick wall above her was of a man lighting a cigarette, and the words said, "Let em all come"

  Men 41-55 Home Defense Battalions Jazz felt a weight on her chest. She reached out and touched cool plastic; the comfort she had gained from the torch had all but vanished.

  She sat up, taking in a few rapid breaths to dispel the dreams she could no longer remember. They had been bad, thats all she knew. Her mother had been there —alive or dead, she could not recall. But the echoes of her dead mothers words still reverberated in her mind. She knew that they always would.

  She was cold and uncomfortable, and it felt as though shed been asleep for a long time. Her muscles were stiff, her neck ached from where she had been resting her head at an awkward angle, and her right hand tingled with pins and needles.

  Jazz clicked on the heavy torch and shone it around the shelter. She was alone. The Uncles had not come down here and found her, and although she knew the likelihood of that was remote, she still felt incredibly vulnerable, as though the trail of tears she had left behind was something they could follow.

  Whos to say? she thought. Until today I had no idea of what the Uncles were really capable of. She aimed the strong beam all around the shelter, then clicked it off, satisfied that she was really alone.

  They were waiting to kill me. The facts were punching back into her life like knives reinserted into old wounds. They killed Mum, and they were waiting there to kill me as well! The why still did not matter, though she thought it would soon. The simple fact of that terrible truth was enough for now.

  She stood and stretched, letting out an involuntary groan that echoed around the shelter. She crouched down, startled. No reaction from anywhere; no sudden burst of activity from the shady corners or behind the shelving units fixed along the walls.

  There was food here. She could smell it beneath the odor of old dampness and forgotten corners, and she went search-ing. Starting at the end of the tunnel farthest from where she had entered, Jazz began looking through the stacked shelves. She was immediately struck by the huge variety of goods down here.

  This was more than just a hideaway, it was a store, and many of the items she found were distinctly out of place. One shelf was piled with hundreds of CDs, ranging from Mozart to Metallica. The next shelf down held boxes of plant seeds still in their packets, and below that were piles of random-sized picture frames, all of them lacking pictures. A family that never existed, Jazz thought, and the idea chilled her more than it should.

  Between the shelving stacks, on the floor, were small cardboard boxes. Rat traps. She had no wish to look inside to see what had been caught.

  On the next stack were models of fantasy figures still in their boxes, empty sweets tins filled with one-penny pieces, a shelf of sex toys of varying shapes and sizes, tourist guides to London and beyond, stacks of watches still in their boxes, a variety of cacti, flat-packed furniture, jewelry, books, bed-ding, bumper stickers, childrens cuddly toys, dining sets, gar-den gnomes, empty wallets and purses, empty rucksacks. . .

  Peeking out from behind the units were old wartime posters, some of them unreadable but a few still quite clear. It felt peculiar, reading these exhortations to a lost genera-tion that had feared losing itself. One in particular struck her:

  Keep Mum, Shes not so Dumb!

  Across the print a newer message was scrawled in marker pen:

  Make them go away!

  The tone behind that desperate plea was more disturbing than the age of the poster it was written on.

  It chilled her but at the same time made her realize how much her life had changed. Up until recently, things had been controlled and overseen. But now she was. . .

  Free? she thought. No. No flicking way. Im more trapped by Mums murder than I ever was before.

  Fighting back tears —Mum would want her to look after herself, not stand here crying—Jazz moved on, and on, and eventually she found a series of shelving units with lockable doors. No doors were locked, but they were all closed, and when she opened the first one her stomach gave an audible rumble of pleasure.

  She plucked out a pack of bourbon cream biscuits and ripped it open. They were soft and probably well past their use-by date, but the first one tasted exquisite. She had no way of telling the time, but she felt that she had been down here for a long time. Even if shed had a watch, it wouldnt have done her any good; she could never wear one, because they always broke when she put them on. Her mother sus-pected the radiation from dental X-rays, though whether this was paranoia or a joke, Jazz had never been sure.

  Either way, she ignored it as absurd.

  Whatever the hour might be, Jazz decided it was lunchtime.

  Several biscuits eaten, she moved on to the next cup-board. There was plenty of tinned food in here but no tin opener, and she did not feel inclined to go searching for one. A box of crackers looked more inviting, and when she opened the last unit she found four fridges, stacked two high and all working. Inside —butter, cream cheese, salads, and milk.

  She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of fresh food, and something moved behind her.

  Jazz fell to her knees and clicked off her torch. She was still bathed in stark light, and for a moment she thought she was pinned within the beam of someone elses torch. Then she remembered the fridge lights, and she slammed the doors closed.