The City's son

CHAPTER 6

The doors beeped and slid quietly shut. Beth rolled to her feet and looked around. She wasn’t alone. Dozens of figures crowded together on the seats: men and women dressed in business suits, teens ignoring everything but their flickering phones, an OAP half-buried under plastic bags.

‘Er- Er, excuse me,’ Beth started, forcing a way down the aisle between them, ‘excuse me, but what is this? Where are we?’

No one answered; no one reacted to Beth at all. She approached one girl who looked about the same age as her. She was wearing a posh school uniform and blowing bubble-gum like a manga fantasy. ‘Hey,’ said Beth, ‘what’s going on?’

The girl didn’t look at her but just kept blowing her bubbles, popping them and starting over: blow out, pop, suck back, chew; blow out, pop, suck back, chew.

As Beth watched she realised every bubble was identical, and each one was popping exactly the same distance past the girl’s heavily glossed lips.

A thrill of understanding ran through her. They’re all the same bubble, she thought.

She looked around her, and now she could see all of the carriage’s other occupants were also doing one thing, over and over: scratching a nose, crossing their legs, tapping a mobile phone, turning a page. She hadn’t seen it at first in the dim, flickering light, but looking closely, she could see the fraction of a second’s discrepancy as each person reset. As Beth stared, the girl in front of her wavered, faded, until Beth could see the stained fabric of her seat through her stomach, then she was back again, blowing her single perfect bubble.

‘You’re not real, are you?’ Beth said quietly, her whole body thrumming with the strangeness of it. She said it out loud: ‘You aren’t real-’

Are you ghosts? she wondered, with a shudder. Were you trapped here?

But they didn’t seem like ghosts to her. They were more like memories — memories of passengers, a few seconds of their lives, snatched out of time and imprinted within the train, repeating over and over like a scratched CD.

Beth rolled her gaze around the train carriage with its faded fabric seats and peeling panels. She remembered the questioning sound it had made. This was the inner architecture of a living thing. Was she inside its mind? Are they your memories? Is it you, remembering them?

Brakes squealed and hydraulics hissed. The carriage began to sway. Beth felt her stomach plunge. The train was moving.

She ran to the door and hammered the button, but nothing happened. Panic clawed at her and she pressed her face to the window. Through the cracked glass she could see the crosshatched bricks of the tunnel whipping past, faster and faster. She was locked in — and they were speeding up. She reeled away from the door and threw herself at the entrance to the driver’s cab: maybe she could stop it from there? Blue sparks flickered on the teeth of the ghostly passengers, who swayed with the train, unflinching.

The door to the cab was locked, and though Beth wrenched frantically on the handle, it wouldn’t budge.

‘Christ on a bike!’ she yelled, drawing her fist back and slamming it against the door in frustration — and it went straight through the door.

Beth shivered and pulled her arm back. This time she pushed it forward more slowly; it passed through the metal as if it were vapour.

The door, like the bubble-blowing girl, was as insubstantial as a thought.

Beth hesitated, then pushed herself through.

The train exploded from the tunnel.

Beth stared wide-eyed around the cab. There was no driver. Air pummelled her face as though the front of the train wasn’t there. She felt her fear level out, and as she swallowed down her panic, something else, a hot, raw excitement, rose in its place. She reached out and petted the thing’s controls. The engine purred to her. Blue electricity danced around her hand but it didn’t touch her.

The driver’s window seemed to waver. Beth took a deep breath. She leaned forward and the window-pane parted around her like cold mist. She gripped the sides of the control panel and hung out over the train’s insubstantial prow like a figurehead. Regiments of sleepers shot by under her. She tasted the diesel on the wind. She found herself laughing hysterically, and the wind snatched the sound. She uttered a wordless shout of elation and the train’s whistle sounded joyously in response.

A bulky mass squatted low in the distance as they surged onto the vast, rail-matted viaduct leading to Waterloo Station. On each side, houses and billboards and glimmering towers boiled together into a continuous river of darkness and streaks of yellow light. Railway signals burnt red through the autumn mist, suspended from a bridge as black and dark as hangman’s scaffold.

Beth wasn’t just riding the train, she was riding the entire city. The rush of it filled her and she crowed — but the yell of affirmation died in her throat: another pair of lights was coming towards them.

There was another train.

Beth stared. Each second brought the lights closer, and each second made her more and more certain. Excitement turned to horror. She gaped in disbelief, but it was true…

The other train was on their tracks.

‘Stop!’ she yelled to the creature that carried her. ‘Stop, we’re going to hit it!’ But the wind snatched her voice away and her train did not slow, even as the other engine, their lethal mirror-image, came on inexorably towards them. She could make out its shape now: a massive freight train, striped yellow and black like a wasp and armoured in heavy steel. But it wasn’t a natural train either: electricity whirled around it in a constant storm. Its fenders were hooked around like mandibles. The braying of its harsh steamwhistle shivered along her neck like a warcry.

The air felt suddenly thick with electricity. It tasted burnt. Beth turned and ran, plunging back through the driver’s door. She lurching up the gangway between the fidgeting memories Move, Beth, move ‘Too slow,’ she cried out loud, ‘too slow!’

Christ, Beth, you’re too slo Screeeeeeech!

There was a piercing scream of metal and the shudder of impact. The train slammed to a halt, hurling Beth backwards. Her stomach flipped over as she hit the floor hard. The chill mist of the train-thing’s wraith-like front wall coated for a second and she rolled out onto the tracks.

No air! Her lungs clawed at vacuum for a moment, and then she erupted into a hacking cough. Her arms were scraped raw and hot blood was smeared over her brow. She pushed herself up on her elbow — and gazed up at the impossible.

There was no wreckage, no twisted, smoking, white-hot steel. The trains were above her: she was lying on the tracks and they were forty feet above her. Their front carriages were rearing up off the rails like snakes and…

And they were fighting.

They butted and grappled with each other, their fenders interlocked like horns. They emitted hisses and screeches of sheer machine effort. But the freight train was bigger and heavier. Its carriages bunched together like muscle as it hurled her train to the earth. The ground quaked, and Beth quaked with it as the freight train lashed down, cobranimble, chewing at the undercarriage of its enemy with its wheels.

Sparks and something like oily blood gushed from Beth’s engine, and it screamed.

‘ Stop it! ’ Beth yelled, stumbling forward, waving her hands as if she was trying to ward off a wild animal. She was coughing, half-mad with impact and smoke, but she clambered over the ruined body of her train, hollering like an idiot. ‘ Get off it! ’ she screamed again, smoke scratching at her throat until it was fit to bleed. ‘Get away!’

The vast freight train arched backwards, cocooned in blue lightning, ready to strike. It flickered, and blurred, leaving strange after-images: a steam-engine, a squat underground train, a trail of memories, as though it couldn’t remember what it was. Its steam-whistle brayed like a tormented thing.

The cold white beam of its eye fixed on Beth. It snorted steam-breath. She felt its weight over her like a promise.

‘For Thames’ sake — get the crap out of the way! ’

She staggered as something shoved her aside. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a figure: a skinny boy wearing only a pair of filthy ripped jeans. His skin was as grey as concrete and his face was taut with fear.

And then the freight train crashed down, its fender-jaws tearing at the tracks. The shock of it wrenched the world out of focus. The figure vanished. Beth shook her head, trying to clear it, bewildered by the din. Had she imagined-?

No, there he was, on top of the monster, somehow. His ribs pressed through his chest with each heaved breath. He gripped what looked like an iron railing in one hand and as Beth watched he stabbed it down, again and again, into the train-beast’s metal skin. The makeshift weapon punctured the steel like tinfoil, and every time it went in the beast shrieked.

Wheels whirred into motion, squealing against the tracks, and Beth rolled sharply out of their path. Her ears popped as the freight train clattered past her, the grey boy still clinging to its roof. The carriages it dragged behind it faded into insubstantial nothingness as it gathered speed.

Beth shook herself like a dog, trying to get some feeling back into her stunned limbs, some sense into her head. She pushed herself up and ran to her train’s side.

It mewled pitifully at her with its whistle.

‘Hey,’ she whispered, ‘hey, you okay?’ She patted and stroked it, though the metal around its wounds was almost searing to the touch. It stirred, and sounded again. She could feel the fear and pain coming off it, making the hairs on her arms stand up. Through its windows she could see the people-memories, repeating their actions, but now their faces wore terrified expressions.

The train groaned and rolled painfully up onto its wheels.

‘Good boy,’ she whispered, ‘good boy. Listen, there’s a boy- That freight train’s got him. He… he pushed me, got me safe — we have to help him… can you-?’

Maybe it didn’t understand her — why should it? Or perhaps it was simply too scared — but no, after a moment it jolted itself into forward motion, all the while lowing in animal panic. Axles churning, it roared off towards the station.

Beth stood lonely and tiny in its wake, sucking in great gulps of air. ‘ Wait…’ she started, but her voice faltered as she stared after it.

A thunderous drumming grew loud on the tracks behind her: the freight train was clattering back, howling victoriously. The concrete-skinned boy had been shaken almost loose and now he dangled from its side, his body snapping in the wind like a pennant.

Beth watched in horror as the beast charged straight at the viaduct wall, but then, a second before impact, the train-beast wrenched itself sideways and a hideous sound filled the air as it scraped itself lengthwise along the bricks, a horrible, teeth-clenching metal sound — a sound pierced through by a human scream.

As its last few carriages passed she saw him, the concrete-coloured boy, sprawled face-down on the tracks. Every atom of her body was screaming at her to run — she shouldn’t be here; she should never have got on the train. But the memory of the boy’s elbow in her side stopped her.

He’d saved her life.

And now she was running, but running towards him, cursing her reluctant legs, her battered arms pumping.

In the shadow of the station the freight train was already checking its momentum, like a bull, turning for a final charge to finish its enemy. It swept around, and she could see its mad, staring headlights.

She skidded onto her knees in the gravel. The boy wasn’t moving. His ankle was pinned down by heavy chunks of rubble. His back was cruelly torn open where he’d been dragged over the bricks. The blood that glistened there was dark as oil.

‘Wake up!’ Beth slapped his face. ‘Wake up!’ She shook him hard. She knew by the shudder of the rails that the freight train was close.

Thrum-clatter-clatter ‘Wake up!’ she screamed.

At last he stirred, but sluggishly. He mumbled something, but she couldn’t make out what it was. ‘Wake up!’ She hooked her arms under his and tried to pull him away, but it was no good: his ankle was trapped fast.

The onrushing freight train stormed in her ears.

One of the boy’s eyelids flickered. He mumbled again, and this time she could just about make him out as he breathed, ‘ Spear — ’

Thrum-clatter ‘Spear? What spear? Where-?’ She looked around.

The iron railing lay across the track, shuddering with the monster’s approach. Beth seized it in clammy hands and wedged it under the rubble. She threw her weight down on it and the smallest rock lifted, just a fraction.

The boy screamed as he exploded up from the ground. His shoulder caught Beth in the gut, driving her feet from the ground. The railing grazed her hand as he snatched it away.

Beth’s head snapped backwards. Headlights washed over them and the freight train roared. The boy grunted and threw the railing. It pierced the front fender and skewered itself deep into the ground.

There was an eruption of blue light, an after-image of vast, blunt, churning teeth. And then darkness swallowed Beth whole.

The world returned slowly with a hiss of distant traffic. Beth’s nose told her she was alive — as far as she knew, neither Heaven nor Hell smelled like a blocked Southwark drain. She didn’t open her eyes. Footsteps crunched in the gravel near her head.

‘Well, you look dead.’ The voice had a tinge of an East End accent. ‘But you don’t smell dead, and if that’s a heartbeat I’m hearing then you don’t sound dead neither.’

A hand slipped behind her shoulders, another cupped her head and she was hoisted onto her feet. ‘Up on yer pins, come on.’ The boy helped her to steady herself, then stood back. He frowned, leaning against his railing.

He looked about sixteen, but it was difficult to be sure because his eyes sat in deep pits and his cheeks were sharp to the point of looking starved. The skin stretched over his ribs was a mottled grey, as though he’d soaked up the soot and oil from the city and been permanently stained. He looked like a street-urchin from one of those old books, but wilder, more feral, and halfway to being grown-up.

Beth stared at him, wide-eyed and confused. She looked around, but there was no sign of the train-beast. ‘Where’d it go?’ she asked, breathless. It felt like a more urgent question than her planned follow-up: Who the hell are you?

‘The Railwraith?’ he said. ‘I earthed it, spread the charge out through the ground.’ He shrugged ruefully. ‘Should’ve thought of it sooner, I s’pose, but when something that big and angry comes rushin’ out the dark at you, first instinct’s to stick it with something sharp, know what I mean?’

He squinted at her critically as she stared at him, then he laughed. ‘Second thought, maybe you don’t. What in Thames’ name d’you think you were doing, yelling at it like that? Trying to reason with it? You think Bahngeists can talk?’

Beth spread her hands helplessly.

Droplets of petrol-hued sweat stood out on the boy’s bizarrely coloured skin, etching paths around starkly defined muscle, tendon and bone.

‘You’re weird,’ he said. He stared at her for a few more seconds like she was a particularly freakish museum exhibit, then he snorted and stomped past her towards the edge of the viaduct.

‘Wait!’ Beth called. ‘Wait, where are you going?’ He ignored her and Beth had to run to catch him up. She became suddenly and painfully aware of the bruises covering her legs and back.

‘You can’t just go — hey, I’m talking to you!’ She caught his arm. ‘I saved your life back there…’ She stumbled as he suddenly spun round.

His teeth were bared like a hissing, feral cat. ‘Yeah?’ he snapped, ‘well, I saved yours first, and the way things are going I reckon my achievement’s gonna last a lot longer than yours does.’

Dawn was just beginning to seep in at the edge of the sky and in the half-light Beth could see the tension around the boy’s eyes. He scowled, trying to look fierce, and her fear faded: for the first time he wasn’t some alien, cocksure street-creature but a teenager, frightened out of his wits.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked softly. ‘What are you so scared of?’

‘I’m not scared.’

Beth just kept looking at him.

‘I don’t see what business it is of yours,’ he said after a long pause, ‘but that Railwraith was sent — sent for me. Somebody’s trying to kill me, somebody who-’ He broke off and looked nervously at the horizon, where the dome of St Paul’s breached the skyline. Cranes clutched at it like cruel metal fingers.

‘Trust me,’ he muttered, ‘if he wanted you dead, you’d be brickin’ it too.’ He fell silent, squinting suspiciously at a pigeon flapping overhead.

‘And?’ Beth asked.

‘And what?’ He looked at her sullenly.

‘Who’s trying to kill you?’

‘Why do you care?’

‘Why do I care?’ Beth was taken aback by the question. ‘I… I just-’

He shoved his railing in between the tracks and folded his arms. The fear she’d seen vanished, hidden behind a veneer of bravado. ‘Yeah?’

‘Look-’ Beth gritted her teeth. He might have rescued her from being crushed, burned and electrocuted, but his high-and-mighty attitude was pissing her off. ‘I just saved your bloody life, right?’

The boy made to protest, but she held up her hand. ‘ Don’t interrupt me. Admit it or not, I saved your life. Now, if you’re going to turn around and get killed, I might as well not have bothered. Frankly, I resent the wasted bloody effort.’

The boy’s face deepened to an even filthier shade of grey. ‘I saved your life, too,’ he snapped.

‘Yeah,’ Beth said, ‘twice. What’s your point? Because you saved my life, I’m not supposed to give a crap that someone’s trying to take yours?’

‘What?’ Now the boy looked confused.

‘You asked why I should care.’ Beth pronounced the words with exaggerated patience. ‘Why shouldn’t I bloody care? Why did you even tell me if you didn’t expect me to care? Ooh, “ Someone’s trying to kill me ”.’ She slapped her cheeks in mock horror. ‘Am I supposed to be impressed by that?’

The boy blinked. His forehead wrinkled. ‘Well, aren’t you?’ he said in a small voice.

‘YES!’ Beth yelled. ‘I BLOODY AM! THAT’S WHY I’M ASKING!’ She sat down hard on the gravel.

The boy, looking both sheepish and thoroughly confused, sat down beside her. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks for saving me.’

Beth breathed out hard. ‘Back at you,’ she said, then stuck out a hand. ‘I’m Beth.’ He took it, but didn’t say anything. ‘And your name is?’

He just shook his head.

‘Fine, be bloody mysterious.’ She sighed. ‘But if this was my school and you didn’t give yourself a name they’d give you one of their own, know what I mean? And trust me, you wouldn’t like it.’

They’d probably just call you Urchin, she thought. That’s what I’d call you. That’s what you look like: a five-years-later snapshot from a ‘Help a London Child’ campaign.

They sat a moment in silence He rubbed at the inside of his wrist and for the first time, Beth noticed the mark there: a tattoo, slate-grey against his lighter skin. It looked like a semicircle of tower blocks, arranged to form the spokes of a crown.

‘So who is trying to kill-?’ she began, but he cut her off sharply.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask questions — don’t try. You saw monsters tonight.’ He gave a sickly grin. ‘And I’m probably the worst of the lot, so just forget me. You people can forget anything if you try hard enough.’

‘Come on,’ Beth protested, ‘whoever it is, he can’t be that bad. The way you took on that train-thing-’

‘He’s worse,’ he said flatly.

‘Yeah, but still-Whoever he is, I bet we could take him.’ We. She didn’t know why she’d said that.

Pavement-grey eyes met hers. He smiled, and she smiled back, but then he shook his head ruefully. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, you’re fun — in a bone-breaking kind of a way. Maybe, after this is all over, you can come find me.’ His smile was wan. It didn’t look like he was holding out much hope that ‘after this was over’ there’d be much left to find.

‘Where would I look for you?’ Beth asked.

He hesitated, and then said, ‘Your accent says Hackney…’

She nodded.

‘All right, Hackney Girl, look for me at the dance where the light itself is the music, where the Railwraith’s rush beats the drums.’ He eyed her appraisingly. ‘Look for me in the broken light, when this is all over, and maybe then we’ll dance. But for now, go. It’s gonna be bad enough me trying stand against what’s coming. I can’t be tripping over you too.’

The dismissal felt like a fist clenching around Beth’s guts. ‘Why not?’ she whispered.

He gave her a lopsided smile. ‘Because I saved your life,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want to resent the wasted effort.’

‘Look, mate-’ Beth began, but in that same moment the grey-skinned boy sprang up and sprinted away along the tracks.

Beth swore and pushed herself after him. She had never run so fast; her battered muscles squealed in protest as the rails blurred under her. For a second they were side by side, but slowly, agonisingly slowly, he pulled away. Beth’s breath seared her lungs, but he just ran faster and faster. His motion became strangely smooth, sinuous, like a street rat’s. He almost didn’t look human any more.

He jumped up onto the wall of the viaduct and was silhouetted against London. For an instant, the low tumble of the city’s skyline was like an army, backing the scrawny boy. Then he dropped over the edge.

Beth arrived seconds later, wheezing and cursing. She craned her head over the wall. Early morning cars hooted up at her from the street below. But in between their fleeting shapes she saw nothing.