CHAPTER VII - "ESCAPING THE TUBE"

A modern day London, England based Horror short story.

 

ESCAPING THE TUBE

My name isn't important- what I have to tell you is. Please, just listen to

me- for five minutes, how does that sound- if you don't believe me after

five minutes, you can dismiss me as a crank, a lunatic... but please, for

the love of God, just listen to me!

We were on the Tube, the Victoria Line, my girlfriend Sally and I, right?

We were coming home one snowy November evening after a day's

lectures, home to our little flat in Camden, home to relax with a

bottle of wine and some telly- however you want to see it. The

Northern Line was delayed indefinitely- God knows why, power

failure, terrorist scare, something like that, I have to admit I hadn't

really read the signs properly- so we'd hopped on a different Tube

from usual in the hope of getting home some time before the New

Year, thinking maybe we'd be able to snag a bus from somewhere

afterwards. We got seats for a change, and sat back for the ride.

It should have been fine- it was only one stop, for God's sake,

one short hop from Euston to King's Cross, one simple journey,

not really further than walking distance (but with the weather

the way it was we were blowed if we were walking), a journey

we'd made hundreds of times...

Should have been.

I hate the word "should" now, you know?

JFK should have had a nice quiet day in Dallas.

The World Trade Centre should still be standing.

Hurricane Katrina should have caused far less damage.

See what I mean? That one little word, that one little "should"

that tells so many, many lies...

The usual electronic voice came over the tannoy, telling us

that the next stop would be the one we wanted. People started

muttering, getting up, getting ready to leave... the usual. I

myself didn't- as I'd managed to get a seat for once I was

determined to sit in it for as long as was feasibly possible.

I noticed Sally started rolling herself a cig, ready for when

we hit the outside world and rolled my eyes but didn't say

a word- from past experience I knew there would be no

point in doing so. Saying something would only have spoiled

the rest of the evening, so (just as she oh-so-often put up

with my bad moods when my football team lost) I put up with it.

Then the Tube stopped. I looked up, expecting the doors to

"whoosh" open, expecting to see a brightly-lit station platform

appear on the other side of the window-

Instead there was nothing. Just the plain, flat black of tunnel wall.

No-one spoke, but that was to be expected. People very rarely

speak on Tubes- it's almost as if speaking would be against some

strange, archaic, unwritten law- just like the one that says you

don't make eye-contact with the person opposite you.

So we sat, in silence, and we waited. It was just a delay, I

reasoned- pretty soon we'd discover that something electronic

had gone haywire in some office somewhere, or perhaps that

some wiring faulty since the 1980s had finally burned out further

down the track. More morbidly, perhaps there would be the

announcement that there had been a suicide, or worse yet- that

there had been another bombing. I glanced at Sally, and she at me.

I saw unease flicker behind her pretty grey eyes- what did she

see in mine, I wondered.

Someone coughed further along the carriage, and I relaxed a little.

That's the spell broken, I thought, we'll set off again any time now,

we'll set off and we'll all be home soon, laughing with our partners

and our families and anyone who'll listen about how screwed up

the Tube is these days, and how something really ought to be

done about it...

Only it didn't break, and we stayed put.

And that's when the whispering started. It was almost imperceptible

at first- pencils on exam papers, you know? Like... like the bad kids

used to whisper to each other in detention. I was tempted to join in

with the whispering at first, whisper something to Sally- possibly one

of my infamously bad jokes, possibly a promise of filthy pleasures to

come that night, I don't know- but something stopped me. Just

exactly what stopped me I'm not and never will be sure- some strange

eerie feeling, you know, like you'd get in a church, like you'd get in

a graveyard- but it stopped me nonetheless.

Some nameless, creeping dread that locked my jaws tighter together

than superglue and turned my blood to iced water.

And the whispering grew louder now- now it was no longer so much

whispering as the sound of static coming from an untuned telly, or

the sound of hail on your windscreen on a winter's night.

Odd enough on its own-

And then you realised that for all that whispering no-one's mouths

were moving. Insidious and awful as nerve gas, fear gripped all of us

in that carriage, gripped us all in its ferocious talons and squeezed.

Now, I have big problems dealing with stress- always have done, as

long as I can remember. As that hideous, otherworldly whispering

grew ever louder- now it wasn't just static, now it was nightmare

surf crashing on a wasted, blasted alien shoreline- I could feel my

chest grow ever tighter. Black spots began dancing in front of my

vision and everything began swimming madly in and out of focus-

heart attack, a voice that sounded insanely like my mother's

pronounced in my head, heart attack at twenty-five, what a waste.

I turned to say something to Sally, but couldn't. My jaw opened

and closed noiselessly, as I tried to comprehend just exactly what

the monstrous, pulsating Thing I saw filling the window behind her

head was. At once both leathery and slimy, it seemed to ooze in a

way that flesh shouldn't- couldn't- have been able to, hideous,

monstrous flesh that was livid and bruised-looking, filled with vile

yellow goat-like eyes and vicious snapping fang-filled mouths-

murderous little mouths that whispered insanely and constantly!

Rather mercifully (or at least, it seems that way with hindsight),

my brain chose this point to finally blow a fuse, plunging me

into unconsciousness.

I awoke in a hospital bed three days later, apparently. I say

"apparently" as I don't remember doing so, probably because

of all the drugs they had to use to sedate me. Probably for the

best that they did, too- I flew into a rage, it appears, and tried

to rip the throat out of the poor nurse who'd been examining my

eyes, tried to rip her throat out with my teeth, poor girl, all the

time screaming about mouths and eyes and Things That Should

Not Be lurking in the Tube.

No-one yet knows where everyone else who was on that Tube

train went, and it's now almost nine months later. Mass hysteria

has been suggested by the Powers That Be, but I know of no form

of mass hysteria that would cause an entire Tube train- some several

hundred souls- to suddenly smash every single window and pour

lemming-like out into the tunnels under London. I know of no form

of mass hysteria that would cause every single one of those several

hundred souls to vanish into the tunnels and never be seen again.

Yes, they say it was mass hysteria brought on by an unfortunate

malfunction in the train, and it was terrible and shocking and must

never happen again and blah blah blah...

...But I know better.

Oh yes, I know better.

I told them at the time, told them what I'd seen, but no-one

wanted to bring themselves to believe me- or possibly they

couldn't bring themselves to believe me. They listened to me,

and they nodded to themselves and smiled sadly, and said how

terrible it must be for me...

…Before pumping me full of drugs and promptly forgetting me.

Forgetting all about me and spreading their comfortable, believable

mass hysteria lie instead.

But I know better.

The last thing I remember seeing, the last moment I remember in

the tunnel, is that hideous, bloated body pulsing, writhing with new life.

Anciently, grotesquely pregnant with some obscene monstrous progeny...

It needed to feed, you see.

Needed to feed them.