A door stood in front of her, the blue paint long since peeled and faded to an awful grey. Plastic numbers barely visible, the gold painted finish all worn off. The last door in a line of grey doors on the third floor, overlooking a concrete courtyard. The grey doorways faced onto a grey balcony, with a metal handrail painted white, but chipped and rusted with age and disrepair. Below, broken swings and a creaking see-saw. Bottles, cans and mouldy paper bags. The smell of piss and vomit.
A grey door, just like all the others, yet every detail had been seared into her mind. Every fleck of paint, every scratch and stain. The precise way that it stood, not quite shut. A crack, showing a last glimpse of the apartment beyond. She could hear the muted sounds of shouting. An argument. A television turned up too loud. The dull thump of a bass-line pounding through the concrete walls.
She should go back. Not walk away like this. Go back and do something. Do something, but she didn't know what. She couldn't remember what she was doing here. Couldn't remember what was beyond that door... What could be so important. What she was running away from.
The thought lurked in the back of her mind, like a space where a tooth had been. She felt the flaking paint of the railing, the rusted metal rough against her fingers.
What was she doing here?
The ugly space in the back of her mind. Something trapped in shadow. An emptiness, sucking her in.
White paint, flaking on her fingers as she rubbed them together. The door, slightly ajar. Bass-line pulsing in her skull. Thudding, like a heartbeat. Like the feeling you get as the headache first begins to settle in.
The door creeping open. The gap widening. The emptiness sucking her in.
What was she doing here?
The last door in a line of grey doors, creeping open. She knew. She knew what was behind that door. She should have closed it then. Should not have let herself look back and see that door, half-open.
She should have closed it. Her feet were like lead. Her heart pounding in her throat. The bass-line, thudding in her head. One foot, then the other. Closer to the opening, the darkness, the emptiness. She held out a shaking hand towards the handle, but it continued to swing wider, moving just beyond her grasp. She reached out, a desperate whimper escaping from her lips as she leaned in closer.
And then the door frame was not a frame, but a vast archway, growing higher, wider. The darkness came rushing forwards. Her feet could not hold her, and the whimper became a scream. She was falling, falling down through that vast opening, falling into the darkness that rushed up to swallow her.
Rachael woke to find herself surrounded. Bodies pressed in all around as a thunderous sound bellowed in her ears. The carriage swayed violently as it swept around a bend in the tunnel. The clamour of voices could barely be heard over the constant rumble reverberating from the tunnel walls. They rode through total darkness, buried deep within the earth.
Slowly, her breathing calmed. Rachael checked her bag, the contents apparently untouched. She had little enough to steal, but the thought still nagged at her. The woman in the next seat glowered at her from the corner of one eye, before returning to her sudoku puzzle.
For the price of a single ticket, you could ride the Circle line until midnight. The underground was warm and dry, the trains rattling on through the same dark tunnels as they had for a hundred years, smelling of oil and grime. After the encounter on the rooftop the day before, she had retreated down into the tunnels, somewhere safe, hidden away. Curled up in a corner seat on the train, she kept her bag hugged to her chest and her hood down low, doing her best to simply shut out the sound of the other travellers.
The hours ticked by as the train pulled into one station after another, the crowd in the carriage shifting, changing shape, but never really seeming all that different. Sometimes she sketched, picking a face at random and letting it flow out onto the page. She liked drawing people on the underground. They tried so hard to block out everything around themselves, to become completely disengaged, and yet they allowed so much of themselves to flow to the surface.
She drew, and sometimes she dozed, head tucked against the corner of the window frame. Days on end of huddling in doorways and alleys had left her exhausted, and it was easy to nod off in the warmth, rocked to sleep by the gentle but insistent swaying of the carriage.
Somewhere half-way between dreaming and waking, she noticed that a man was watching her from across the carriage. He had steel grey eyes, tanned skin and a buzz-cut. He wore a patched black leather jacket. There was a tension in him that unsettled her. Still groggy, she clutched her bag tighter, ready to slip out at the next station. The train slowed, coming to a stop with a hiss as the doors opened. For a moment she couldn't move, trapped by the press of bodies squeezing past. She was ready to slip into the crowd when she glimpsed the empty seat where the man had been sitting. As the carriage began to fill again, like a tide coming back in, she searched the crowd but saw no sign of him. Uneasily, she stayed where she was. Most likely, she'd only imagined the man was looking at her.
The train moved on. Time blurred, and she felt sleep pulling her back in. When she awoke again, she wasn't sure how long she had been sleeping for. She was alone. She supposed it was late; likely the trains would be stopping soon. In spite of the noise booming from the walls of the tunnel, it felt strangely quiet in the empty carriage. Small gusts of wind pushed the litter around the floor, as lights flickered past in the darkness.
Then she saw that it wasn't litter, but tiny clouds of golden brown leaves that danced across the floor of the carriage. The more she looked, the more she saw, covering the ground like a field in autumn. Some unfelt breeze lifted them in tiny clouds and flurries, to weave through the air and scurry over the seats and around the hand-rails. She reached out to catch one. Paper-thin, it crumbled between her fingers.
The voice was barely a whisper. How she had even heard it over the sound of the train, she could not guess. She couldn't even say where it came from. She only knew that she had heard one word, whispered close, almost to her ear.
“Rachael.”
The train rolled on. The leaves continued to dance and play at the air, though she could not feel the slightest breeze, and the word repeated itself, almost an echo.
“Rachael.”
She clutched her bag to her chest and tucked her knees up close, becoming as small as she could be. Glancing about the empty carriage, she summoned up the courage to cry out.
“Who's there?”
The only answer was the whisper of her name once more, as if close by. She looked about wildly, unsure of what she could possibly have missed, but there was not a single person, not one thing out of place, save for the swirling clouds of autumn leaves.
Then the patterns of the leaves began to change. It was slow, at first. It took her a while to realise that they were gathering, spiralling gently inward towards a spot at the centre of the carriage. The cloud of leaves began to rise up like a pillar, still swirling in tight spirals.
Rachael watched in fascination as the pillar of swirling leaves grew taller and broader. Distinct shapes formed at either side, branching away. Then she saw that the shapes were not branches but arms. The form of a human figure began to emerge, taking slow steps towards her, one hand outstretched. The movements of the leaves grew ever tighter, until they were gathered together into a solid mass. A woman's body with the shape of a simple dress about it, and a face emerging from the pattern of leaves. Empty spaces formed eyes and a mouth. Then, in a voice that was a thousand rustling leaves on a cold autumn day, a single word.
“Rachael.”
Rachael closed her eyes and screamed.
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