No matter: today he was grateful enough not to have to walk more than a few minutes carrying the Book From Hell. The train for Tower Gateway came rumbling along, stopped and opened its doors. It was crowded, and Patel slipped in through the door and put the book down on the floor, bracing it between his shins lest it fall on someone’s foot and get him involved in what would probably be a completely justified lawsuit for grievous bodily harm.
The train swung south the few blocks to Tower Gateway. There Patel got out with his burden, walked along the platform and took the escalator up through the tubelike corridor that led to the overpass which avoided the mainline BR tracks: then down the other side again, and out across the open concrete plaza from which jutted several large slabs of ancient wall, not much more than fieldstones mortared together—a remnant of the old days when the City of London was all the London there was, and that tiny square mileage had a proper defensive wall of its own. Nothing to do, of course, with the other walled edifice just this side of the river…
As he went down the stairs to the underpass tunnel which dove under the traffic stream of Minories Street, Patel glanced up and caught a glimpse of crenellated tower against the clouds: one of the metal windvane-banners mounted on a pinnacle of the Tower’s outer wall stood frozen in mid-swing against the wind, then spun suddenly to point west in a gust off the Thames. Sky’s getting nasty, Patel thought. Might rain. Hope it stops by the time I’m above ground again…
He headed through the underpass, breathing a little harder now from the weight he was carrying: am I getting out of shape? I can’t wait to get rid of this thing … and up the stairs on the far side: past some more “islands” of old preserved City wall, and then down again into the Tower Hill Underground station.
He pushed his train ticket into the turnstile before him, waited for the machine to spit it out again. The turnstile’s oblong vertical pads snapped open before him as he plucked the ticket out of the machine’s steel mouth, and Patel pushed through, along with about a hundred other people, making his way toward the stairs leading to the Circle Line and District Line platforms. There he would catch the last leg of his trip, the Tube train to Monument, and meet Sasha at the coffee shop at Eastcheap and Gracechurch Street: and she would take this thing off his hands … And arms, and shoulders, but particularly the hands, Patel thought, and headed down the stairs, stepping a little to one side so as not to be trampled by the people behind him. A direction sign just ahead of him said, Platforms 2 and 3, District and Circle Lines, west.
He headed for the sign, changing the bag again from left hand to right hand with a slight grimace as he went, and turned the left corner, toward the Tube platform—
Dark. Why was it dark all of a sudden? Power failure, Patel thought. Though where’s the light behind me? He turned—
The smell was what hit him first. My God, what is that ? Did the sewer break through in here or something—But there was no way to tell. He couldn’t see. Patel turned again, took a few hesitant steps forward. There was something wrong with the ground. It felt mushy—
—and then suddenly light broke through again, the watery gray light of the morning he had just left: a few spits and spatters of rain reached him even here in the tunnel, blown in on that chilly wind. Some part of Patel’s mind had now begun to go round and round with thoughts like How the heck is there daylight down here, I must be fifty feet underground and The smell, what is that smell??—but that part of him felt strangely far away, like a mind belonging to someone else, in the face of what he saw before him. A street, and the gray day above it, those made sense: buildings pressing close on either side, yes, and the enamelled metal sign set high in the brick wall of the building opposite him, saying Coopers’ Row, that was fine too: the math/business building of the University was up past the end of the Row, in Jewry Street, and he would have been heading there after meeting Sasha. But there was no pavement to be seen. There was hardly any road visible, either: it was covered ankle deep in thick brown mud, the source of the godawful smell. Must have been a sewer break, said some hopeful part of his mind, steadfastly ignoring the basic issue of how he was suddenly standing at ground level.
Patel walked forward slowly, trying not to sink into the mud, and failing—it came up over the tops of his shoes: boy, these trainers are going to be a loss after this, and they were only three weeks old, how am I going to explain this to Mum … ? Squelch, squelch, he walked forward, and came to the corner of Cooper’s Row and George Street, looked down toward Great Tower Street in the direction of the Monument Tube station—
It was not there. The road was lined with old buildings, three- or four-story brick edifices all crowded together where multi-story office buildings should have been. The traffic was gone, too. Or rather, it was all replaced by carriages, carriages pulled by horses, their hooves making a strangled wet clopping noise as they pounded through the mud, up and down Great Tower Street. Patel staggered, changed the bag mechanically from the right hand to the left, and took a few more steps forward, looking away from the traffic, don’t want to see that, doesn’t make sense, and across to the Tower.
It at least was still there: the great square outer walls defining the contours of Tower Hill stood up unchanged, the lesser corner towers reached upward as always, “the windvanes on them wheeling and whirling in the gusts of wind off the river—the wind that bore the stink forcefully into Patel’s nostrils and the rain, now falling a little harder, into his face, cold and insistent. That wind got into his hair and tried to find its way under his jacket collar; and around him, the few trees sprouting from the unseen pavement rocked in the wind, their bare branches rubbing and ratcheting together. Bare. That was wrong. It was September. And other things were moving, rocking too—
Momentarily distracted by the motion, he looked past the Tower, down toward Lower Thames Street and the great bend of the river which began there. A forest, he thought at first, and then rejected the thought as idiotic. No trees would be so straight and bare, with no branches but one or two sets each, wide crosspieces set well up the trunk: nor would trees be crowded so close together, or rock together so unnervingly, practically from the root. The “trees” were masts … masts of ships, fifty or seventy or a hundred of them all anchored there together, the wind and the water pushing at the ships from which the masts grew; and the bare shapes silhouetted against the morning gray were all rocking, rocking slightly out of phase, making faint uneasy groaning noises that he could hear even at this distance, for they were perhaps a quarter of a mile down the river from where he stood. From that direction too came a mutter of human voices, people shouting, going about their business, the sound muted by the wind that rose around him and rocked the groaning masts together—
That groan got down inside Patel, went up in pitch and began to shake him until he rocked like the masts, staggering, falling, the world receding from him. The bag fell from Patel’s hand, unnoticed.