Whispers Under Ground

me. Then, presumably, I could have been pickled, put into a glass case and displayed at the Tate Modern. Brit Art’s loss was my gain, but it did mean I couldn’t wriggle that way. As far as I could tell, I was currently lying inside a sort of concrete tent with no visible way out.
    I extinguished the werelight – they burn underwater but I didn’t know yet whether they burned oxygen or not, and I decided it was better safe than sorry. In the renewed darkness I considered my options. I could try and use impello to dig myself out, but that would always run the risk of collapsing the rubble on top of me. I had to assume that a rescue attempt would be made. Even if Reynolds had been a casualty, Kumar had been further down the platform – he knew I was here. In fact, there had to be CCTV footage of the whole thing from the feed into the station control room. I bet it was spectacular and even now was probably finding its way to the news company with the biggest chequebook.
    Any rescue attempt would involve people clumping around in big boots, yelling at each other and operating heavy equipment. Chances were that I would hear them long before they could hear me. My most sensible course of action would be to lie still and wait for rescue.
    It was remarkably quiet. I could hear my heartbeat and I was in danger of starting to think about my breathing again, so I made myself think about something else. Like who the hell our pale-faced hoodie Earthbender was. Now, you could literally fill two whole libraries, complete with card files, reference sections and a brass ladder thing that whooshes around on rails, with everything I don’t know about magic. But I think, had it been at all common, Nightingale might have mentioned a technique for gouging great big holes in solid cement.
    Nightingale aside, the only practitioner that skilled who I’d ever met was the Faceless Man – who could catch fireballs, deflect flying chimney stacks and also, possibly, leap moderately sized buildings in a single bound. I knew this hadn’t been the Faceless Man himself because the Earthbender’s body shape and posture had been all wrong. Could he have been an acolyte or a Little Crocodile or possibly one of the Faceless Man’s chimeras?
    Lots of possibilities, not a lot of facts.
    The Earthbender had been travelling east, back into the West End, and had got off at Oxford Circus, a station less than a kilometre from the original Strip Club of Doctor Moreau. After we’d closed the club down, me and Nightingale had speculated that the Faceless Man’s new base of operations couldn’t be very far from Soho. He might be faceless but his chimeras, his poor little cat-girls and tiger-boys, weren’t exactly inconspicuous – hard for them to move around unnoticed and most sightings of them had been in the area. When I was chasing after the Pale Lady she’d headed for Piccadilly Station as if it was a safe haven. But they certainly weren’t getting around on the tube, with its ubiquitous CCTV cameras and the ever-vigilant Sergeant Kumar.
    Now I knew there were other tunnels, secret tunnels and who knew what else, all going who knew where. Perhaps the Faceless Man knew where. Perhaps the Earthbender was helping him build more. A subterranean secret base in the fashion of a James Bond villain. The Faceless Man had the accent for it, true, but did he have a cat? I had a flash of him sitting in a swivel chair with a full-size cat-girl called Sharon perched on his lap while she’s talking to her BFF on her mobile. ‘ And then he’s like “Do you expect me to talk” and the master’s all “No I expect you to die!” and he’s … What? I’m just telling Trace about last night .’ The thought made me giggle, which was nice – you need a bit of humour when you’re buried under a ton of rubble.
    I reckoned the sly fucker had built his new lair under cover of the Crossrail construction work. Why not? The project had been sinking random holes into the ground for years and wasn’t even expected to be completed for at least another five – you could have stuck a whole hollowed-out volcano adjacent to Tottenham Court Road station without the public noticing.
    But not without the contractors noticing or Health and Safety for that matter, I thought, and then I remembered a cool autumn night and coming across the Murder Team closing off a crime scene at the top of Dean Street. Had that been Graham Beale’s little brother? A top sub-contractor