The Naming of the Beasts

Without discussion, Trudie took one side of the tunnel and I took the other. We moved fast, scanning walls and floor for any obvious breaks, openings or trapdoors. The dust underfoot deadened the echoes of our footfalls, but the sound of our breathing came back to us, amplified and distorted, from the tunnel’s further end, adding to the illusion that we were being swallowed alive.

We kept moving, roughly in sync. I was setting a good pace, but Trudie’s long stride easily matched mine. There was no sign of any opening off the tunnel ahead of us; it seemed to extend into unfathomable distance.

Then I spotted the mouth of a cross-way. It was invisible from a distance because the white-tiled tunnel wall stood proud at that point, concealing the actual opening until we were very close to it.

We quickened our pace until we reached the intersection. The right-hand tunnel was blocked after about ten feet by a concrete wall that looked fairly new. Road signs and traffic cones were stacked in this shallow space in great profusion. On our left the side tunnel went on for about twenty feet and then angled sharply, again to the left.

It made sense to cover this side branch first, rather than leave it to be explored on on the return leg. We walked quickly to the corner, skirting it widely to avoid being surprised.

Ahead of us there were only a further ten feet of corridor, ending in another wall of grey concrete. Set into it was a door, over which a sign - hanging slightly askew - read THAMES FLOOD CONTROL CENTRE.

‘That’s just surreal,’ I muttered.

‘It’s obsolete,’ Trudie answered, her voice pitched as low as mine. ‘Before they built the Thames Barrier, every borough had its own flood warning centre. This must have been where Camden’s was based.’

We tried the door, found it locked, and went back to the main corridor. As we advanced now, I became aware that there was something wrong with the endless perspective of the tunnel ahead of us. The proportions were subtly - and then not so subtly - off true. A few moments later, Trudie muttered a profanity.

‘The ceiling is closing in on us,’ she said.

She was right. It had been high above our heads when we started, but now it was almost close enough to touch. As I stared up at it, I heard a distant basso rumble.

‘The road tunnel,’ I said. ‘They built it inside the shell of the underpass. The road is right over our heads here.’

This stretch of the tunnel was more untidy, with piles of bricks, steel buckets and even the occasional hammer or trowel stacked against the wall or casually dropped on the floor. Dead leaves had drifted in ragged heaps against all of these objects, giving each of them its own dull brown comet tail.

We kept on moving, and the distance between floor and ceiling kept on narrowing, so that after another couple of minutes we were having to stoop. It was hard to fight off a feeling of claustrophobia. Trudie reached up and touched the underside of a manhole cover, gave it a tentative push, but it was rusted into place. It was obvious it hadn’t been opened in decades.

Up to now the air had smelled only of dust and damp stonework, but in this stretch of the tunnel it had curdled into something much more unpleasant: a sweet-sour tang like rotting vegetables, overlaid with something hard-edged and chemical. It was subtle at first, but it intensified as we went forward.

Up ahead it now looked as though the converging perspective lines met within a few hundred yards, rather than at some distant horizon. I was about to make some remark about running out of road and suggest we turn back, when I realised that I’d been tricked again by the flat light and the ubiquitous white tiles.

The floor and the ceiling didn’t actually meet at all. At the point where we would have had to go down on all fours and crawl to keep moving forward, the corridor ended at a letterbox-shaped opening about two feet high but stretching across the full width of the underpass. Just in front of it, on Trudie’s side of the corridor, a dark irregular mass resolved itself as we approached into a human body.

This was where the rotting-vegetable smell was coming from, and Trudie covered her mouth with her hand as she knelt to examine it. I crossed the tunnel to look over her shoulder.