Pandaemonium by Ben Macallan Page A

routinely for bomb shelters and slept down there every night. Huddled, shrouded figures, somehow private and communal both at once: each little personal space like a single tesseract in a mosaic, helping to make a bigger picture.
    There were no rails for a train to run along, down on the track below the platform edge. Even so, we had never colonised the railbed, either here in the lights of the open station or in the tunnel beyond. Stairs at each end of the platform offered an easy way down, and even so. People made their beds along the platform, and kept to it. Kids would race up and down the track, play cricket and their own more imaginative games, shriek and holler from one end to the other and dare each other into the tunnel’s dark – but never for too long, and they’d come back, come up when they were called. I think there’s something inadvertent in the human psyche, something ingrained. Tunnels are caves, and tigers lurk within; canyons are river-beds, only waiting for the flood.
    Sometimes the kids seemed only too happy to be called away.
    “What do you do for toilets, showers, laundry? Lunch, come to that?”
    I grinned at him. “What, you think we’re a dirty people? Or a hungry one?”
    “No, I just think you’ll have a solution, you must have. Only I can’t see it here.”
    “Come with me. A tour of the facilities, courtesy of your willing guide.”
    I wanted to take him out of earshot anyway. Nobody here would spy for anyone outside – or at least I thought not, and so did Reno, or she wouldn’t take them in. But I’d been wrong before. I’d missed a spy, so had other people, and trouble happened. For other people, mostly, then and later. Responsible was how I felt.
    Learn from your own mistakes, and other people’s trouble. I was a lot more cautious now.
    Other people, in their troubles. Coincidences happen, that’s why we have the word; it’s not all fate or physics, it doesn’t have to be inevitable. Sometimes it’s just chance.
    Like when you’re walking along thinking about one person in particular, and suddenly there they are.
    I’d been thinking about caves, and modern substitutes, and what you still might find inside them. And about spies, and the spied-upon, and what trouble that had led to. Dead people, in the end.
    And here was a bench with someone sprawled along it, even their face covered with a blanket, which of course only made me think about the dead again though I’m sure they were only sleeping; and just beyond, huddled up against the foot of the bench was a figure shrouded in a blanket of his own, only he lifted his head as we passed and gazed up at me in a kind of bleak disintegration.
    And I looked down at him and knew him, even in pieces as he was, just a shard of what he used to be; and what he used to be was resplendent and terrible beyond measure, cruel and generous and true. I had run away from him before, when he was the Sybil in her cave; but then she had been the one to run away, driven by foreknowledge, that day her cave was broken open and we were all dragged down to Hell. That day that Asher died, and Salomon too, and –
    Gods, was it only yesterday? Really? Was that even possible?
    Possible or not, we’d come a long way since then. Not in time, perhaps, and not in distance travelled, but a long way none the less.
    Mostly down, I thought, for most of us.
    For her, most certainly. For him, I mean. I thought I ought to mean. There wasn’t a trace of drag about him here; he was only a man in middle age, in torment. In a suit and tie beneath his blanket, because I guess that was what he did, how he dressed without thinking when he wasn’t being Sybil. Not being a voice in the wilderness, not singing out.
    His suit and tie were doing him no good. Classic Englishman’s armour, but nothing can defend against destruction from within. His eyes were hollow horrors. If Sybil the grande dame still lurked anywhere inside him, that was where she showed, crouched in