Whispers Under Ground

needles.’ She looked at Abigail. ‘How did you know this was here?’
    ‘You can see the hole from up on the footbridge.’
    Keeping as far from the tracks as we could, we made our way under the footbridge and headed for the concrete mouth of the tunnel under the school. Graffiti covered the walls up to head height. Carefully sprayed balloon letters in faded primary colours overlaid by cruder taggers using anything from spray paints to felt tip pens. Despite a couple of swastikas, I didn’t think that Admiral Dönitz would have been impressed.
    It kept the drizzle off our heads, though. There was a piss smell but too acrid to be human – foxes I thought. The flat ceiling, concrete walls and the sheer width that it covered meant it felt more like an abandoned warehouse than a tunnel.
    ‘Where was it?’ I asked.
    ‘In the middle where it’s dark,’ said Abigail.
    Of course, I thought.
    Lesley asked Abigail what she thought she was doing coming down here in the first place.
    ‘I wanted to see the Hogwarts Express,’ she said.
    Not the real one, Abigail was quick to point out. Because it’s a fictional train innit? So obviously it’s not going to be the real Hogwarts Express. But her friend Kara who lived in a flat that overlooked the tracks said that every once in a while she saw a steam locomotive – because that’s what you’re supposed to call them – which she thought was the train they used for the Hogwarts Express.
    ‘You know?’ she said. ‘In the movies.’
    ‘And you couldn’t watch this from the bridge?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘Goes past too fast,’ she said. ‘I need to count the wheels because in the movies it’s a GWR 4900 Class 5972 which is 4–6–0 configuration.’
    ‘I didn’t know you’re a trainspotter,’ I said.
    ‘I’m not,’ said Abigail and punched me in the arm. ‘That’s about collecting numbers while this was about verifying a theory.’
    ‘Did you see the train?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘I saw a ghost. Which is why I came looking for Peter.’
    I asked where she’d seen the ghost and she showed us the chalk lines she’d drawn.
    ‘And you’re sure this is where it appeared?’ I asked.
    ‘ He appeared,’ said Abigail. ‘I keep telling you it’s a he.’
    ‘He’s not here now,’ I said.
    ‘Course he isn’t,’ said Abigail. ‘If he were here all the time then someone else would have reported him by now.’
    It was a good point and I made a mental note to check the reports when I got back to the Folly. I’d found a service room off the mundane library that contained filing cabinets full of papers from before World War Two. Amongst them, notebooks filled with handwritten ghost sightings – as far as I could tell ghost-spotting had been the hobby of choice amongst adolescent wizards-to-be.
    ‘Did you take a picture?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘I had my phone ready and everything for the train,’ said Abigail. ‘But by the time I thought of taking a picture he’d gone.’
    ‘Feel anything?’ Lesley asked me.
    There’d been a chill when I’d stepped into the spot where the ghost had stood, a whiff of butane that cut through the fox urine and wet concrete, a Muttley-the-dog snigger and the hollow chest roar of a really big diesel engine.
    Magic leaves an imprint on its surroundings. The technical term we use is vestigia . Stone absorbs it best and living things the least. Concrete’s almost as good as stone but even so the traces can be faint and almost indistinguishable from the artefacts of your own imagination. Learning which is which is a key skill if you want to practise magic. The chill was probably the weather and the snigger, real or imagined, originated with Abigail. The smell of propane and the diesel roar hinted at a familiar tragedy.
    ‘Well?’ asked Lesley. I’m better at vestigium than she is and not just because I’ve been apprenticed longer than her.
    ‘Something’s here,’ I said. ‘You want to make a light?’
    Lesley pulled the battery out of her mobile and told Abigail to follow suit.
    ‘Because,’ I said when the girl hesitated, ‘the magic will destroy the chips if they’re connected up. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. It’s your phone.’
    Abigail pulled out last year’s Ericsson, cracked it open with practised ease and removed the battery. I nodded at Lesley – my phone has a manual switch I’d retrofitted with the help of one of my cousins who’s been cracking mobiles since he was