Excerpt: Salazar's Door

The girl woke in a cold sweat.

It was very dark down here. Reaching out with a shaking hand she turned on the small battery lamp that she kept next to her bed. It filled the room with a weak and metallic yellow light. Pulling her legs to her chest she scanned the room for signs of danger. As usual, there was nothing - only her breath and the rattle of trains overhead.

It used to be a store room of some kind. Rickety wooden shelves still clung to the wall, holding solvents whose labels dated back to the twenties and earlier. At some point in the room's history a jar of engine oil and been smashed and now pooled on the floor in a pancake of solid amber. Her bed was in one corner, an old mattress raised on crates to protect her from the damp. She'd read somewhere that damp could get into your bones and joints, and if she wanted to keep one step ahead of them, then she'd have to stay nimble.

She liked to make up stories about the tunnels. In her stories the noises in the night were the ghosts of long-dead commuters, their spirits snagged to the tracks like wisps of fur in a poacher's trap. Fears were less paralysing when you gave them a face.

Sometimes she was the ghost, a pale shadow caught in the light of a passing train.
Sometimes.

Her stomach growled hungrily and she wondered how long she'd been asleep. The old alarm clock next to her bed had stopped working weeks ago and since then she'd drifted from one day to the next, inhabiting a different set of hours each time. She liked the kind of shipwrecked feeling it gave her, like flotsam; the freedom to come and go as she pleased, not like in the Home. Here she could make her own life, away from those strangers up there who knew nothing about who she really was. Not that she was any wiser.

Pulling her bag over one shoulder, she took the lamp and made her way down a passage and out onto the abandoned platform. They were called ghost stations. Looking around it was easy to see why: the brick work was spun with white cobwebs, wall tiles shining like phospherance through the grime. Her stomach made another angry sound as she crossed to the mesh wire that seperated the platform from the Bakerloo Line - a little way down the track there was another service tunnel that would provide her with access to the world above. There was a hole in the mesh but she didn't climb through it just yet. Instead she switched off the lamp and waited.

She could hear a tube approaching.

Seconds later it thundered past, clanking along the tracks like a steel centipede, all noise and bright lights. She watched the stutter of faces buried in newspapers, animated in conversation - oblivious to the deserted platform as one by one they disappeared into the tunnel's mouth. Then, just as suddenly, there was silence. She strained her ears - imagining whispered voices, footsteps - but there was no sound.

Something else was down here, though. It was also looking for something.

Perhaps it was looking for her.

In the distance the signal light switched from green to red. Taking a deep breath she jumped down onto the tracks and ventured towards it.