‘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.
It miaowed at her silently through the glass.
Feeling a surge of disgust, she went to the call box and peered in through one of the dirty panes. Lonnie made a circle at her with his thumb and forefinger and winked. Then he pushed ten-pence into the slot and talked with someone. He laughed — soundlessly through the glass.
Like the cat. She looked over for it, but now the window was empty. In the dimness beyond she could see chairs up on tables and an old man pushing a broom. When she looked back, she saw that Lonnie was jotting something down. He put his pen away, held the paper in his hand — she could see an address was jotted on it — said one or two other things, then hung up and came out.
He waggled the address at her in triumph. ‘Okay, that’s th — ‘ His eyes went past her shoulder and he frowned. ‘Where’s the stupid cab gone?’
She turned around. The taxi had vanished. Where it had stood there was only curbing and a few papers blowing lazily up the gutter. Across the street, two kids were clutching at each other and giggling. Doris noticed that one of them had a deformed hand — it looked more like a claw.
She’d thought the National Health was supposed to take care of things like that. The children looked across the street, saw her observing them, and fell into each other’s arms, giggling again.
‘ I don’t know,’ Doris said. She felt disoriented and a little stupid. The heat, the constant wind that seemed to blow with no gusts or drops, the almost painted quality of the light . . .
‘What time was it then?’ Farnham asked suddenly.
‘I don’t know,’ Doris Freeman said, startled out of her recital. ‘Six, I suppose. Maybe twenty past.’
‘I see, go on,’ Farnham said, knowing perfectly well that in August sunset would not have begun — even by the loosest standards — until well past seven.
‘Well, what did he do?’ Lonnie asked, still looking around. It was almost as if he expected his irritation to cause the cab to pop back into view. ‘Just pick up and leave?’
‘Maybe when you put your hand up,’ Doris said, raising her own hand and making the thumb-and-forefinger circle Lonnie had made in the call box, ‘maybe when you did that he thought you were waving him on.’
‘I’d have to wave a long time to send him on with two-fifty on the meter,’ Lonnie grunted, and walked over to the curb. On the other side of Crouch Hill Road, the two small children were still giggling. ‘Hey!’ Lonnie called. ‘You kids!’
‘You an American, sir?’ the boy with the claw-hand called back.
‘Yes,’ Lonnie said, smiling. ‘Did you see the cab over here? Did you see where it went?”
The two children seemed to consider the question. The boy’s companion was a girl of about five with untidy brown braids sticking off in opposite directions. She stepped forward to the
opposite curb, formed her hands into a megaphone, and still smiling — she screamed it through her megaphoned hands and her smile — she cried at them: ‘Bugger off, Joe!’
Lonnie’s mouth dropped open.
‘Sir! Sir! Sir!’ the boy screeched, saluting wildly with his deformed hand. Then the two of them took to their heels and fled around the corner and out of sight, leaving only their laughter to echo back.
Lonnie looked at Doris, dumbstruck.
‘I guess some of the kids in Crouch End aren’t too crazy about Americans,’ he said lamely.
She looked around nervously. The street now appeared deserted.
He slipped an arm around her. ‘Well, honey, looks like we hike.’
‘I’m not sure I want to. Those two kids might’ve gone to get their big brothers.’ She laughed to show it was a joke, but there was a shrill quality to the sound. The evening had taken on a surreal quality she didn’t much like. She wished they had stayed at the hotel.
‘Not much else we can do,’ he said. ‘The street’s not exactly overflowing with taxis, is it?’
‘Lonnie, why would the cabdriver leave us here like that? He seemed so nice.’
‘Don’t have the slightest idea. But John gave me good directions. He lives in a street called Brass End, which is a very minor dead-end street, and he said it wasn’t in the Streetfinder.’ As he talked he was moving her away from the call box, from the restaurant that sold curries to take away, from the now-empty curb. They were walking up Crouch Hill Road again. ‘We take a right onto Hillfield Avenue, left halfway down, then our first right . . . or was it left? Anyway, onto Petrie Street. Second left is Brass End.’