The train labours, shivers, jerks; shudders a few yards forwards, stops. The lights go out. I am left in a comfortable darkness, polarized by those ever-active bulwarks of local history: the London Hospital and the Jewish Burial Ground. It is easy in this enforced silence to imagine the novel on my lap as a brick of impacted light: a freak reaction has converted the text into a pack of unrepressed images. They have a startling bacterial luminescence; giddy and dangerous. If I dared to turn the pages I know that I would reveal all the word-inhibited secrets: the steel engravings would begin to move, stone figures would shake off their shadows; white buildings would open their flaps to disperse the panicked basements. There would be a remission of violence.
When the lights came back on the book in my hand was a square of black cloth: the dustwrapper had slipped on its glassine hinge to reveal Millom’s final critique; an effort coming as close as his nature would allow to a jest. He had pasted a reduced photocopy over the snapshot portrait my wife had taken for the rear flap: Tenniel’s illustration of Alice in the Train. The windows have been Tipp-Exed; Africa reduced to a phantom. The linear whirlwind of the railway carriage is now a radiant plaster skull — with Alice and the ‘gentleman in white’ clinging, pathetically, to the zygomatic arches. They are the handles of a drinking vessel, balanced in the symmetry of perpetual confrontation.
Millom knew from the start that I would open his parcel as soon as I got on to the train. He had probably succeeded in ‘withdrawing’ enough electricity to hold us in the tunnel. That was his message, or his warning. But there is something else: book worms, I can accept, but Millom’s pun is grossly literalist. A slithering sightless string-inch breasts the fore-edge of the novel, like a Polish cartoon; wriggles free, drops on to the tartan-covered seat. The heart of the book has been hollowed out, cut away; scooped like melon-flesh. Millom has filled the wounded cavity with contraband earth. Moist pink and grey things are knotting on the carriage floor, covering my boots; multiplying. The shape of a key has been pressed into the miniature grave.
IX
The spiteful pulsing of the rods in their frozen canisters became the pulsing of Cec Whitenettle’s heart. His hand squeezed gently on the geared control. The power of the track travelled through him, so that his hair turned to fire. He was the messenger of the immortal ones. His softly lit cab did not move: it was the tunnel that rushed past him, a hood of black velvet. He was restored, revived; he outpaced the darkness. Rodents scuttled to escape his bladed monster. The slanting walls of the embankment washed over him in green waves. The train was a water snake; it twisted and burrowed beneath the sleeping streets. It absorbed the dream-jungles of all the sleepers. The streamlined observation window became the visor of a winged and wired helmet. Cec listened to a scatter-speak of voices, living and dead: the controllers. It had happened; he was himself the core of the fusion, the germinator of the force he was riding.
It was only with the switch to the branch line, the plunge into the Whitechapel burrow, that the old fears returned. Every night, without fail, a red beast, a kind of deer, stood waiting for him on the curve. He did not touch the brake, but always drove straight on — at it and through it. He would not allow the creature’s presence (or its meaning) to trouble him. His cab was monitored: if the central computer showed him slowing, anywhere, he would be surrounded in seconds by balaclava’d security-men, armed snatch-squads eager to redefine the ‘rules of engagement’. He would be rapidly converted to an unemployment statistic — waiting for his number to be called in some linoleum-carpeted retirement home; doped to the eyeballs, nodding through a remorseless procession of soap operas and advertisements; wetting himself.
Cec knew there was no living deer: no animal had been reported going over the fence from Victoria Park. The animal was a two-dimensional cartoon; lurid, sticky with varnish. It was the Roebuck of Brady Street, moonlighting from its pub-sign pasture. Now, apparently, even this mild territorial guardian was infected with panic, and obliged to understudy its own apocalypse. One of these days, Cec decided, he would confront his fear — go down the Roebuck, order a drink, sit with the Irish and the Maltese, talk about car auctions.
What did the quacks know anyway? Giving him placebos, coloured smarties, like some kid — pretending that would cure him. ‘See how you go. Come back in a month, Mr Whitenettle. We can adjust the prescription.’ Was it reasonable? Who would want to achieve marital intimacy when the whole world was dying? Do apes hump in their cages? Not bleeding likely: they wank themselves stupid. Cec had read all the relevant stuff himself, down the library. Transient Global Amnesia, Automatism, Psycho-motor Epilepsy: your hands can never break free from the controls because they are part of a circuit. A single fracture will destroy it all, lay waste the landscape. The power is in the machine. We have only to hang on, put all our trust in its deeper wisdom.
The roebuck is waiting for him. ‘Hold up, you fucking Bambi. I’ll have you.’ The creature, for the first time, faces the train — head on: gone rogue, its eyes full of blood. Cec cannot break his grip. The harder he strains, the more power he releases. The engine bucks, leaps, rears. The track hisses like a punctured hose, heats to orange-white: the rails open like the ribs of a clattered Buddha. They are liquid spears of rage. Cec starts to laugh. It hurts his stiffened face. He is a jockey, a monkey mounted on a mad dog. It is no longer his affair. Let the train jump its brook; let it tumble down the perilous chasm between the banked windows of the hospital, with all its revenging monsters, and the eternally poisoned site of the first sacrificial murder.
Rattles the crossing: nothing now will halt the fire lizard. It will bury itself, beyond sight, on the far side of the buffers, the sand traps, in a dead-end tunneclass="underline" a drain for anguish. Excused by the formal density of madness, Cec lies on his back, smiling: the stones of London are his heaven, and they move. They slide. He will excavate remote sources of darkness. He is redundant, the train needs him no further: it will travel on, through yellow clay and blue rock, ferrying the solemn dead in search of incorruptible rivers.
X
Tattered and exhausted, Arthur Singleton, haunter of stations, prisoner of White Chappell, planned his escape from the treadmill of time. The field of his ‘life force’ was too weak to interest the cameras: undetected, he hooked his rope over the crossbar of the gantry that supported this spy system. Like a first-plunge swimmer, he lay groaning; then edged forward, ready to lower himself into the shallow abyss. One foot clung to the platform, the other searched for the neck of the roebuck. It was foretold: only the Triple Death of Llew Llaw Gyffes could release him.
From the deep pocket of his moss-stained overall Arthur drew out Count Jerzy’s massive service revolver, stolen this night from behind the bar of The Spear of Destiny. Its cold barrel, greased and foreign, was inserted in a toothless mouth. He would pull the trigger at the moment of impact. As the train tossed him into the air, so would the rope from the gantry snap his neck; flying, he would squeeze his finger, in a come-hither reflex, spilling his brains into the night — like stars. The unwitnessed silence of his act would stand in place of Llew Llaw’s ‘terrible scream’. The falling gunge and the smoking pink cap would be one; an eagle in the dark. Arthur would, at last, get out from under the responsibility of myth. He would be nothing, nameless; unrequired.