Salazar's Door

Prologue

The girl woke in a cold sweat.

It was very dark down here. Reaching out with a shaking hand she turned on the small battery lamp that she kept next to her bed. It filled the room with a weak and metallic yellow light. Pulling her legs up to her chest she scanned the room for signs of danger. As usual, there was nothing - only her breath and the rattle of trains overhead.

She thought it might have been a storeroom of some kind. Rickety wooden shelves still clung to the wall, holding solvents with labels that dated back to the ninteen-twenties. At some point in the room's history a jar of engine oil had been smashed and now pooled on the floor in a pancake of solid amber. Her bed was in one corner, an old mattress raised on crates to protect her from the damp. She'd read somewhere that damp could get into your bones and joints, and if she wanted to stay one step ahead of Them, then she'd have to stay nimble.

She liked to make up stories about the tunnels. In her stories the noises in the night were the ghosts of long dead commuters, their spirits snagged to the tracks like wisps of fur in a poacher's trap. Fears were less paralysing when you gave them a face.

Sometimes she was the ghost, a pale shadow caught in the light of a passing train.

Sometimes.

Her stomach growled hungrily and she wondered how long she'd been asleep. The old alarm clock next to her bed had stopped working weeks ago and since then she'd drifted from one set of hours to the next like flotsam. She liked the kind of shipwrecked feeling it gave her; the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Not like in the home. Here she could make her own life, free of those strangers up there who knew nothing about who she really was.

Pulling her bag over one shoulder, she took the lamp and made her way down the passage and out onto an abandoned platform. They were called ghost stations. Looking around her it was easy to see why; the brick work was spun with white cobwebs, which shone like phosperance against the grime. Her stomach made another angry sound as she crossed to the mesh wire which separated the platform from the Bakerloo line; further down the tunnel there was another service passage that provided access to the world above through the cellars of a derilect pharmacy. There was a hole in the mesh but she didn't go through it just yet. Instead she turned off the lamp and waited.

She could hear a train coming.

Seconds later it thundered past, clanking along the tracks like a steel centipede, all noise and bright lights. She watched the stutter of faces buried in newspapers, animated in conversation - oblivious to the abandoned platform as one by one they disappeared into the tunnel's mouth. Then, just as suddenly, there was darkness again, although it was not the same darkness as before. She strained her ears. At first there was nothing except an almost physical silence, then suddenly she heard it: a series of hurried whispers; the twist of heels on concrete; and something else that was harder to identify - a kind of static which made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle unpleasantly.

Self preservation told her to run but a stronger emotion rooted her to the spot. This could be her only chance. She bit her lip. A few seconds later series of purple sparks shot through the tunnel, for a moment illuminating a throng of dark robed figures - then came the sound of shattered glass and suddenly the blackness became pitch. They had broken the signal light.

Taking a deep breath, she jumped down onto the tracks and ventured forwards into the darkness.