Mind the Gap by Christopher Golden

“The city’s memories; something like that.”
    They fell into step together, more cautiously this time, making their way deeper beneath London.
    “Not ghosts?”
    His eyes widened a little. “No, not ghosts.”
    “Why not?”
    Cadge glanced away. “’Cause I’m afraid of ghosts.”
    “Just echoes, Cadge,” she said, and she sensed Cadge more at ease beside her. It felt strange, her trying to calm him, but though she seemed to hear and see much more, she could not find it in herself to be frightened. There was something about the visions she’d just seen, a sort of sad innocence, that perhaps had a little to do with the old times they were from.
    “Hear ’em now and then,” he said. “That’s all. Now and then.”
    “So let’s keep them between us for now, yes?”
    Cadge turned to her and smiled, and she saw his pleasure at their complicity.
    “All right by me,” he said. “Besides, there’s plenty else to be scared of down here. Ask Harry to tell you about the Hour of Screams sometime.”
    Jazz frowned. “What’s that?”
    “Told ya, ask Harry. Don’t even like to talk about it myself.” He shivered theatrically, to make sure she got the point. But then he smiled. “We’d best get moving.”
    Jazz shook her head in amusement. “You are so odd.”
    Cadge offered a courtly bow, grinning, and then they walked on. Rats scurried out of their way, avoiding the torchlight. Now and then they heard the rumble and rattle of a train in the distance, like the Underground grumbling in eternal hunger. A wind pushed through the tunnel from ahead of them, carrying stale scents of dust and despair. Jazz had always sensed that down here, every time she’d traveled somewhere with her mother.
London has more than its share of sadness,
her mother had said once.
Like an old person, an old city can sometimes get wistful and melancholy.
    Old city,
Jazz thought.
That’s for sure.
She sniffed the breeze and thought of so many people dead and gone, and the sadness of growing toward death.
    Her mother had been forty-four years old when she died.

Jazz had been down beneath for over a month, but still she searched for news of her mother’s death. Harry made it his duty to keep tabs on what was going on aboveground, and every day one of the lost kids would return from an excursion with a newspaper, bought or nicked. Harry read them, then left them stacked beside one of the storage cupboards, ready to be used to light the occasional fire they had when the tunnels grew cold. Jazz had been looking through these papers, and nobody had interrupted her. They all knew what she was searching for.
    So far, nothing.
    No mention of the Uncles in their black BMWs. No reports of the bloody death scene in their house, no stories about the dead mother and the missing daughter who was yet to be found. Nothing. A blank, as though what had happened was so far below the normal surface of things that nobody knew.
    “
Someone
has to know,” Jazz said. Cadge was sitting beside her, as usual, watching as she scanned the discarded copy of the
Times
she’d picked up from the station platform. “Someone has to know
something.
”
    “From what you said, lots of people know stuff,” he said. “Just that the ones that know don’t wanna tell the papers.”
    She turned another page and read some more old news. Everything here described events happening in another world, and she could not find it in herself to care about another rise in inflation, a minor royal’s indiscretion with a pop star, or the latest record-breaking celebrity divorce settlement. None of that mattered. None of it ever had. Her mother had told her that, and it was her
mother
who mattered, and between these pages of cold dark print there was nothing concerning her mother.
    Up there, her mother’s murderers still walked free.
    She had burned with the injustice of things since spying that initial smear of blood on her mother’s bedroom door handle. But now, for the first