‘Crouch End – I think that’s an ugly name.’
Vetter said, ‘So what did you do then?’
She began to talk. By the time she’d finished, her first cup of coffee and most of another were gone, and PC Vetter had filled up several pages of his notebook with his blocky, sprawling script.
Lonnie Freeman was a big man, and hunched forward in the roomy back seat of the black cab so he could talk to the driver, he looked to her amazingly as he had when she’d first seen him at a college basketball game in their senior year – sitting on the bench, his knees somewhere up around his ears, his hands on their big wrists dangling between his legs. Only then he had been wearing basketball shorts and a towel slung around his neck, and now he was in a suit and tie. He had never gotten in many games, she remembered fondly, because he just wasn’t that good. And he lost addresses.
The cabby listened indulgently to the tale of the lost address. He was an elderly man impeccably turned out in a gray summer-weight suit, the antithesis of the slouching New York cabdriver. Only the checked wool cap on the driver’s head clashed, but it was an agreeable clash; it lent him a touch of rakish charm. Outside, the traffic flowed endlessly past on Haymarket; the theater nearby announced that The Phantom of the Opera was continuing its apparently endless run.
‘Well, I tell you what, guv,’ the cabby said. ‘I’ll take yer there to Crouch End, and we’ll stop at a call box, and you check your governor’s address, and off we go, right to the door.’ ‘That’s wonderful,’ Doris said, really meaning it. They had been in London six days now, and she could not recall ever having been in a place where the people were kinder or more civilized. ‘Thanks,’ Lonnie said, and sat back. He put his arm around Doris and smiled. ‘See? No problem.’
‘No thanks to you,’ she mock-growled, and threw a light punch at his midsection.
‘Right,’ the cabby said. ‘Heigh-ho for Crouch End.’
It was late August, and a steady hot wind rattled the trash across the roads and whipped at the jackets and skirts of the men and women going home from work. The sun was settling, but when it shone between the buildings, Doris saw that it was beginning to take on the reddish cast of evening. The cabby hummed. She relaxed with Lonnie’s arm around her – she had seen more of him in the last six days than she had all year, it seemed, and she was very pleased to discover that she liked it. She had never been out of America before, either, and she had to keep reminding herself that she was in England, she was going to Barcelona, thousands should be so lucky. Then the sun disappeared behind a wall of buildings, and she lost her sense of direction almost immediately. Cab rides in London did that to you, she had discovered. The city was a great sprawling warren of Roads and Mews and Hills and Closes (even Inns), and she couldn’t understand how anyone could get around. When she had mentioned it to Lonnie the day before, he had replied that they got around very carefully… hadn’t she noticed that all the cabbies kept the London Streetfinder tucked cozily away beneath the dash?
This was the longest cab ride they had taken. The fashionable section of town dropped behind them (in spite of that perverse going-around-in-circles feeling). They passed through an area of monolithic housing developments that could have been utterly deserted for all the signs of life they showed (no, she corrected herself to Vetter and Farnham in the small white room; she had seen one small boy sitting on the curb, striking matches), then an area of small, rather tatty-looking shops and fruit stalls, and then – no wonder driving in London was so disorienting to out-of-towners – they seemed to have driven smack into the fashionable section again. ‘There was even a McDonald’s,’ she told Vetter and Farnham in a tone of voice usually reserved for references to the Sphinx and the Hanging Gardens. ‘Was there?’ Vetter replied, properly amazed and respectful – she had achieved a kind of total recall, and he wanted nothing to break the mood, at least until she had told them everything she could.
The fashionable section with the McDonald’s as its centerpiece dropped away. They came briefly into the clear and now the sun was a solid orange ball sitting above the horizon, washing the streets with a strange light that made all the pedestrians look as if they were about to burst into flame. ’It was then that things began to change,’ she said. Her voice had dropped a little. Her hands were trembling again.
Vetter leaned forward, intent. ‘Change? How? How did things change, Mrs. Freeman?’ They had passed a newsagent’s window, she said, and the signboard outside had read SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR.
‘Lonnie, look at that!’
‘What?’ He craned around, but the newsagent’s was already behind them. ‘It said, “Sixty Lost in Underground Horror.’ Isn’t that what they call the subway? The Underground?’
‘Yes – that or the tube. Was it a crash?’
‘I don’t know.’ She leaned forward. ‘Driver, do you know what that was about? Was there a subway crash?’
‘A collision, madam? Not that I know of.’
‘Do you have a radio?’
‘Not in the cab, madam.’
‘Lonnie?’
‘Hmmm?’
But she could see that Lonnie had lost interest. He was going through his pockets again (and because he was wearing his three-piece suit, there were a lot of them to go through), having another hunt for the scrap of paper with John Squales’s address written on it.
The message chalked on the board played over and over in her mind, SIXTY KILLED IN TUBE CRASH, it should have read. But… SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR. It made her uneasy. It didn’t say ‘killed,’ it said ‘lost,’ the way news reports in the old days had always referred to sailors who had been drowned at sea.
UNDERGROUND HORROR.
She didn’t like it. It made her think of graveyards, sewers, and flabby-pale, noisome things swarming suddenly out of the tubes themselves, wrapping their arms (tentacles, maybe) around the hapless commuters on the platforms, dragging them away to darkness…
They turned right. Standing on the corner beside their parked motorcycles were three boys in leathers. They looked up at the cab and for a moment – the setting sun was almost full in her face from this angle – it seemed that the bikers did not have human heads at all. For that one moment she was nastily sure that the sleek heads of rats sat atop those black leather jackets, rats with black eyes staring at the cab. Then the light shifted just a tiny bit and she saw of course she had been mistaken; there were only three young men smoking cigarettes in front of the British version of the American candy store.
‘Here we go,’ Lonnie said, giving up the search and pointing out the window. They were passing a sign, which read ‘Crouch Hill Road.’ Elderly brick houses like sleepy dowagers had closed in, seeming to look down at the cab from their blank windows. A few kids passed back and forth, riding bikes or trikes. Two others were trying to ride a skateboard with no notable success. Fathers home from work sat together, smoking and talking and watching the children. It all looked reassuringly normal.
The cab drew up in front of a dismal-looking restaurant with a small spotted sign in the window reading FULLY LICENSED and a much larger one in the center, which informed that within one, could purchase curries to take away. On the inner ledge there slept a gigantic gray cat. Beside the restaurant was a call box. ’Here you are, guv,’ the cabdriver said. ‘You find your friend’s address and I’ll track him down.’
‘Fair enough,’ Lonnie said, and got out.
Doris sat in the cab for a moment and then also emerged, deciding she felt like stretching her legs. The hot wind was still blowing. It whipped her skirt around her knees and then plastered an old ice-cream wrapper to her shin. She removed it with a grimace of disgust. When she looked up, she was staring directly through the plate-glass window at the big gray torn. It stared back at her, one-eyed and inscrutable. Half of its face had been all but clawed away in some long-ago battle. What remained was a twisted pinkish mass of scar tissue, one milky cataract, and a few tufts of fur.