The Tube Healer
by Matt Wingett
The Tube Healer
by Matt Wingett
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Matt Wingett
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Please note, the characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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The Tube Healer
by
Matt Wingett
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Someone that pretty shouldn't have to cry.
That was the thought in my mind just before the transformation.
She had the most beautiful skin - fine features and high cheekbones, like a Rossetti painting, lithe and elegant. But she was lost in herself - living in her own little hell. Her lips were trembling, her skin pale. Maybe she was crying because, somewhere along the way, a man had broken her dreams. Her 8-month-gone bump could have been testimony to that.
The tube is the most private place for public grief: the way we all travel drawn in on ourselves. Like zombies: lolling, insensible, sardined against each other at rush hour without a tremor of acknowledgement in our minds, and only the tiniest exhalation "scooz" as we push by.
It was there, in the London Underground with its noise and its smell and discomfort, right there, that I saw the first miracle.
What else can you call it? Down there in the London Clay, among the pressed flesh in the tunnelled underworld, an amazing thing happened: new life, new life...
That change amazed me. Her weeping finished in a moment, and from her smiling mouth suddenly a peel of laughter rang out across the carriage: big, rich and joyous, a bubbling fountain of noise bursting from her body. Then there were her eyes. They turned from iron-grey to sky-blue. All this in an instant of surprised transformation.
I couldn't help myself. I pushed through the crush to take a closer look at her, as if I were the photographic negative of a crash-scene ghoul. Where once there had been a body trapped in the wreck, now there was a person sitting and laughing in dazed joy. It was bewildering.
I leaned close. "What happened to you?" I asked.
She looked at me with shining blue in her eyes. "Did you see him?" she asked. "Did you?"
When I looked around, the object of her gaze was already walking out through the sliding doors, becoming a shadow in the underground. I turned back to her, seeking more information.
"What happened?" I asked again, bemused.
"I don't know," she said, and laughed once more. Puzzled, I pushed through the commuters towards the doors to follow him, but a thicket of bodies barred my way, and the doors slid shut in my face. Peering through the glass, I could see a shape on the platform, moving away, obscured by other travellers. An army coat, I noted, and long hair.
That was my first experience of the phenomenon that came to be known as the Tube Healer.
*
During that summer, a rumour started to circulate. In an office in Putney, a secretary walked in to work who, the day before was a neurotic wreck, and was now, to the utter bemusement of her colleagues, transformed into a bundle of smiles and confidence.
In Dalston, an artist whose muse had been lost to him for years walked back into his studio, purposefully washed his brushes, threw off a dust sheet and started to create the most beautiful, sumptuous art.
A middle-aged journalist from Richmond whose life had been embittered by years of grieving for a cruel lover, finally realised that her life was actually better without him.
All over London, in pubs, and clubs, in mothers' groups, in knitting circles, at the checkouts of shops, in cafés over lattes, in book clubs and churches, that rumour became a kind of currency to be exchanged and traded.
People spoke of miracles. It was as if each had found themselves blinking into the light of a brand new day, after undergoing a massive life change. And it was noted by their friends that it happened in the darkness below the streets.
In that incendiary time it seemed that London blazed with new life - as if the sun had managed to find a way to come out at night, and the lost people of the world were basking in its light - even under the ground. The friends of people who had been touched by him decided that, rather than walk, they too might take the tube.
So, Transport for London announced a puzzling statistic. The number of journeys taken on buses dropped off, while the platforms of the tube stations became a press of wondering people, waiting for deliverance to shuttle on down the line towards them. From that underworld, each passenger hoped to return all Persephoned up - a new spring in their lives.
I put my ear to the ground, and my thoughts began to circle endlessly around what had happened to these people who had been changed by him. I walked the tunnels in wonder during the day, and when I was alone at nights, I yearned for the shadow in the army coat, and woke suddenly with staring eyes from dreams of who and where he might be.
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The people on and below the streets were not the only ones to wonder about him. Those in power in our great city also watched the joyful swelling of the pregnant Earth below them, watched people come to life out of the clay, saw them stretch and smile after a long time of torpor, and noted inside themselves a stirring of misgiving. In the darkest recesses of their bodies they sensed a shadow of panic, an unconscious tensioning of the shoulders, a queasiness in the stomach easily mistaken for a reminder of excesses the night before, or revulsion at the things they had decided to do in the day ahead...
In high, high circles, eyes narrowed, and fear began to take a hold.
We did not see those movements in the lofty places that look down on the London Clay. All we felt was that something indefinable, a tiny spark of life that we held in our bodies, had been enmagicked. There was an opening of self on the streets. In the tube for the first time in a hundred years, the buzz of conversation and music of laughter filled the carriages in rush hour. Strangers spoke to each other - no one really knew why - except that there was an intangible expectation. It was as if our next breath might be the most exciting we had ever breathed - and how much more exciting to breathe it together and conspire in happiness! Nobody knew when the man in green would appear, or to whom; and rumours circled stronger and louder till they echoed through the round tunnels of the District Line, the Metropolitan, Bakerloo, Northern, Circle, Piccadilly, like a song that drowned the screech of wheels and lifted our hearts with an ever-rising exultation that manifested as a glow on our grubby human skins.
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Then something changed.
There was a journalist, an unhappy journalist who had been treated badly by someone when she was younger, and had built a reputation for fierceness. Why the man in green chose to help her, out of all the needy people of the underground no-one knows - but once he did, nothing was the same. Perhaps he sensed her pain, and decided that she could still be helped. Perhaps she needed his help more than most, though she would never have admitted it.
Her column that week read:
A funny thing happened on the way to Great Portland Street.
There has been something of a buzz in the office over the last few days. You might recall that for the last fifteen years I have been giving advice to women on how to deal with life - and with men.
It'll come as a surprise to many when you read that I met a man in the tube on the way to Great Portland Street who, somehow, lifted a weight from my heart. I have no idea who he is, but he made me realise it's time to let go of my anger. It's time to give people a chance and recognise they make mistakes. He made me realise that living in the shadow of bad things in the past is a choice. This change I feel I owe to that gentleman in green. So, Mr Mystery, if you are reading this, I want to thank you. Please do come into these offices for an interview!
In case he doesn't read this, does anyone else know who he is? Has anyone else encountered him? I am all ears for news of the Tube Healer!
And so with a few short paragraphs, the cat finally sprang from the bag and was given a name. The leitmotif that had been playing as a background to eight million lives suddenly moved into full consciousness.
After that, it was time for the circus to begin.
*
Things changed. I know they did, because I was in the tube on they day the change started. After that first time I saw him, I too had been looking for him every day. I wanted to ask him something - wanted him to transform just one more lowly life, lift this cross, soothe this brow.
After that article, I saw firsthand how a new rhythm and mood entered the tube. There were questioners. Questioners who spread and asked and spread and asked. And although they wormed their ways through every part of the tube network, asking questions, talking with the newly talkative passengers below, they gleaned very little. Descriptions of the man in green were vague. It was clear that he wore a green coat, that his hair was longish and he might be unshaven, but there was very little other than that. The people who had seen him were uniformly unclear about him, almost reticent and protective.
But News is not neutral. It makes events. Those people who had been filled with an innocent sense of childish wonder in the tube, were replaced by others quite different from those meeklings of the pre-journalist era. Wonder turned into mania. Millions across the city whose lives had never been touched by the Tube Healer, were afforded permission to hope at last. So much fitted into place: the change of mood in the city, the ability of people to see their problems, understand and change them. All was down to this one man in green who, unknown to so many, had been changing people's lives for the better so effectively.
Those who had never even heard of the Tube Healer before the article, discovered that: the dream job they were trying for had suddenly come through, or their pet cat that had gone astray had been returned unharmed, or the tenner they thought they had lost down the pub turned up in the back pocket of their chinos. All miraculously. No doubt about it. Every event a bona fide miracle. A million other miracles were heaped onto the Tube Healer bandwagon, the horses were whipped and the wagon sent careering out of control through the underground at rollercoaster speeds.
In a few brief hours as the mania spread, the general mood of wonder and joy in the tube changed to expectation, and the expectation to a demand for the man in green to appear. Ignoring the injunctions of Transport for London, members of the paparazzi besentried themselves at key positions throughout the network.
Moving in the tunnels, I found myself jostled by photographers, who, like nervy US Marines in enemy territory, fired off trigger-happy shots at anyone they suspected: a blaze of light red-eyeing dazed purveyors of The Big Issue, accountants and supermarket workers alike. There was never a positive sighting. And yet, somehow, the Tube Healer continued his work. Reports came out that he had transformed a suicidal schizophrenic at Seven Sisters, that at Cockfosters an impotent was resurrected, that beneath Chancery Lane a compulsive gambler had kicked the habit and in the shadows of Shadwell a blind man was able to see again.
Each time the Press descended on the latest miracle, they were greeted not by an elated Tube-Healee, but by a sea of other people equally keen to find the Tube Healer. There were those present at each event who pronounced arcane knowledge of him that further investigation revealed as false. There was just a melee of mystics with agendas, desperate people, and curious daytrippers keen to catch a glimpse of the miracleman. Usually, the healee had melted away, to seek a quiet place to discover this new self he or she had been given. On the few occasions the healee was found and spoken to, they were shy of the camera, evasive of the microphone and tight-lipped towards the insistent journalist.
So, somehow, in among all these crackpots and differently-agendaed human beings, the Tube Healer continued to miraclize. Because, yes, that is the verb an American news reporter newly arrived on the scene adopted for this strange phenomenon.
Other nationalities were also attracted to the tube. In that heady atmosphere, people found themselves philosophising and hoping with complete strangers. As a result, declarations of newly-realised love and forgiveness were sent to friends overseas. This stream of messages - texts, tweets and facebook entries started in tens and built to hundreds, then thousands. On distant continents, relatives and loved ones wondered at this change, and were moved by it. Around the world there was a growing realisation that something strange was happening in London. Something strange, but something good.
Soon the woeful, the lost, the inadequate, the deranged and the desperate started their journeys across the world to join the chatter beneath the streets of the great city. Travellers in the increasingly packed tube wondered when their time would come, some smiling politely and laughing at the cattle-truck squeeze, while others chatted about inconsequentials, or found themselves singing with strangers in exultation at change, or the rumour of change.
Rumour was all we had to go on. We were members of a starved public waiting for the random dispensation of manna on a lost tribe, wandering the tunnels beneath the city in blind hope.
I so wanted to meet him. I so wanted my life to change - so that I could break out from this sorrowful, cynical, dusty creature I had become. Because I had witnessed the change in another first-hand, I had stood that close to him - I had so nearly seized the will-o'-the-wisp, nearly clutched the rainbow.
I remembered this in my dark moments, when the tunnels were closed and I needed to surface for food, or drink, or money and be reminded of the world up top from which these tunnels afforded some respite. Respite from myself. That was why I searched the tunnels - because the only other respite from myself I could find was in drink, or in drugs or in another word beginning with "D" which I had contemplated, his white face and black cloak, his bony hand and his garnering blade - and I had flirted with him, and danced with him - and I feared him. The man in green was his opposite. I knew that.
*
Who am I?
I will tell you.
In a previous existence, I was a musician in a band. A handful of hits in the mid-eighties gave me just enough money to really make a mess of the lives of those close to me. There had been one woman, then another. Then three more. And sometimes there had been a few together. Sometimes they thought they were the only ones. Sometimes they knew they weren't and didn't care because they believed that somehow they would change me and that I would be pulled towards them, while the others would be forgotten. As if love were a tractor beam pulling me in to their Death Star.
I played the game with them. The erratic artist. The creature who needed to be left with his demons, and just the hint and promise of them being allowed to understand me - a trail of breadcrumbs into the woods to get them tangled and befuddled so that I could pounce and satisfy myself. I had loved it! Loved every moment of the hedonistic five years I'd floated through as a rock star, forgetting each face as soon as the moment, the expression of tenderness, the kiss, was past. So it went on: a crazy ride that lasted until it finally crashed into the ground.
I can recall only fragments. Firstly, one broken heart too many, then soon after, an abortion that I demanded and bullied. Finally another woman's overdose brought the ride to an end. All these things too close to each other: three deaths, as it were, in the course of a week. After that, there was my exposure in the papers even as I tried to piece my life together. There was the shock of it. There was my sense of inadequacy that overwhelmed me.
And there was The Dog.
The Dog. That's what I called it. That creeping evil black cur with its hackles up snarling at me and following me everywhere. Waiting for me in nightbound places, its red eyes glaring from the shadows of sleep, and making me afraid of the dark. Sniffing me out in brothels in Amsterdam, finding me staring into sickly mornings in Morocco with enough gear to tranquillise a camel. The Dog that snarled and bared its rotten fangs when anyone got too close - lovers, my manager, a string of therapists - chasing them down the garden path and threatening to tear them limb from limb. Never any escape from that evil hound, waking me and locking its jaws on me and dragging me helpless into the morning light and panting "guilt, guilt" at me, until it wolfed down all my creativity and I became an empty shell hated by everyone else because I hated myself.
That is why I was on the tube looking for the Healer. Because I had seen the miracle happen with my own eyes, and what I wanted, what I dreamed of as I pushed forward through the crowds and spent endless hours roaming the tube - was some sort of forgiveness. Some sort of escape. To put the black Dog to sleep once and for all - for the mutt trailed me even through the tunnels. Sometimes, I saw his baleful red eyes glint in the darkness at the end of the platforms.
I was afraid, and I was desperate. That is why, with all my pounding heart I believed in the Healer. I believed that he could do it. He had to...
So, that is me, and that is my story. And that is why I know what went on with the Tube Healer, and know it first hand. I know it better than those journos in their tower, and better than the paparazzi, and better than those distant bloggers, and idlers in pubs who talk about things they never saw, and those who talk from pulpits and mosques and temples and tv screens.
I am a witness, and this is my witness.
*
Even as I crawled through the dark depths, above me the great beast that is London lived on. The newly sprouted elegances of the City probed the sky, and the lower level buildings of a continuously exfoliating conurbation shimmered in the summer light. New developments, renovations, rebuilds - the metropolis was in a state of constant shedding and renewal, just like those below. But somewhere, people above were becoming concerned. Whether it was the weight of people below, the potential for a disaster, or just the sense that they were losing control, machinery started to move. Something had to be done about the Tube Healer. And some of those questioners who moved among the network, they were not journalists. They were huntsmen, seeking their quarry.
*
There are many places you can hide beneath the earth. In the shadows of history, in the secret places of engineered redundancies. There are tunnels beneath the tunnels in which Londoners travel to work, visit lovers, go out for the night - and do the infinite other things that people do. There are stations in existence off to one side of the stations on which commuters wait for the train that will hurtle them on through the dark - whole platforms that lie unused, redundant, thick in grey dust, their posters of an earlier age untouched on the walls, as if, in an alternative universe it is a station that is used regularly, and what we see is only a shadow on a cave wall of what is real and vibrant only a vibration away. There are ways to gain access to these other tunnels, these other circular staircases that stretch untrodden into the depths. There are intersections with other great tunnel networks - such as the mail branch line that used to serve Whitehall - and what were once more secret tunnels, such as The Burrow, where Churchill snatched the occasional good night's sleep in the maelstrom of London bombing.
I was in the tube network early and was continuing my search for him on the District Line, when I sensed a new vibration - a different feeling washing through the tunnels. There was an alien quietness in the air. The usual crush of pilgrims on their devotions beneath the city, the cram of good-humoured fellow travellers, had failed to materialise. Instead, uniformed men in dark colours boarded my train as it stopped at Green Park, while others in the same uniform looked on from the station platforms.
Something was different. Maybe some new intelligence received by these hunters, who had been secretly looking for him for so long, implied that this was his lair. He must be here! I thought, hope surging through my veins. He must be!
I stepped from the train and made my way quickly towards the end of the platform. Groups of uniformed men were moving through the carriages, politely and firmly asking passengers to make their ways to the streets above, where everything would be explained to them. They had been forced to close the line, they explained. Engineering works. They wouldn't say more.
I loitered at the platform end. The driver in his cab was facing the opposite wall while talking into a radio. I took my chance, squeezing past the security barrier and heading further down the line, into the darkness. I refused to be thrown out of the tube. This was my hope. I needed to be here.
As I went, I felt my body tense against the tunnel's darkness. I thought I could see those red eyes in the blackness, and I trembled a while, breathing more harshly in ragged breaths, stumbling, aware that there was a live rail somewhere, staying to one side, pushing through the city's black dust that floated around me, as if darkness were a physical thing.
A voice echoed down the tunnel.
"I thought I saw someone."
A silhouetted figure behind me. A piercingly bright torch beam.
"Yes. Someone down there. Don't move! The rail is live! Do not move!"
I wasn't going to let them take me out of the tunnels. No way. No way. I had to find him. I had to.
Then, ahead of me, a pair of eyes appeared in the dark. Gone as soon as they - Was that? - No. Nothing. - Is there..? I grew more afraid. The Dog. I realised it had pulled me down here to finish me, to tear me limb from limb. I started to cry. I could feel the black whirling desire to just give up and stop breathing rise up through my body. I saw the eyes again in the darkness, and I knew it was too late. It had got me. I saw myself, as if from the outside, and realised that what I was doing was... Yes. I had gone mad. As the thought weighed down on me, I stumbled towards the live rail, and felt a whirl of black despair spin through me.
A hand caught me as I started to fall. A voice broke through from the blackness, a gentle voice urging me to stay calm, speaking with a rhythmic certainty that soothed the fear away. "It's okay," he told me, over and again, in different ways. And it was okay, as soon as he spoke. Then the voice broke off as more beams pierced the tunnel. An echoing shout: "Electricity's off. Let's go."
Booted feet echoed through the tunnel towards us, and I saw his old green army coat and his face in a flash of light. A wild beard and shoulder length hair, medium brown with maybe a flash of red. His eyes were a beautiful blue.
"We need to go, quickly."
"Sure, sure," I answered, a little rocky on my feet at my own fear, but glad to have someone here to ward off the Dog, the terror, the hatred lurking in the dark. We made our ways quickly through the tunnel, and after only a few minutes we saw another patch of electric light ahead of us. The lighting was low, seeming to seep in from higher up, and as we arrived at the station I saw that most of the platform had been sealed up by a yellow brick wall. In the shadow I could make out a tile mosaic reading "DOWN STREET".
The Tube Healer crossed the tracks and climbed up on to the platform. I followed him, and after a while we came to a metal door, which he pushed open and locked behind him with keys drawn from his army coat. The sound of people running came closer and we climbed up through a dark old tunnel to a passage. He pulled out a torch and lit the way, as the darkness engulfed passages on either side. There were cream and green tiles on the wall, that I could make out through the dust. There was also a sign that read in ornate writing: WAY OUT.
He followed its direction, and we went through rooms full of defunct telephone equipment, passing a door with a sign on it reading: ENQUIRIES AND COMMITTEE ROOM. The Tube Healer turned to me and spoke in a clear voice with a hint of an accent I couldn't quite place: "This is The Burrow. It was used in World War Two as a nerve centre for the government when the bombing was at its worst. It's not forgotten, just disused." We came to the foot of a spiral staircase stretching upwards in a great winding helix of grey metal. "You can get access to the road from here. Just climb up..."
"And you? Are you coming up?"
His bright blue eyes flickered for a moment, as if a cloud passed before them. "Up? What is for me up there?" No comprehension appeared in his face at all. Then he added: "Go, now. It is dangerous for you here."
"But what about you?"
"This... here... I am fine here. Go now."
"But wait," I said, the despair rising in me. "I saw what you did. Weeks ago I saw what you did. I have been looking for you ever since. I came to get your help. I need your help. Please!"
He looked afresh at me, those pulsing eyes settling on me with renewed interest as I continued.
"I have this creature inside of me. It eats me away. I need to stop it. I just... I want my life back. I need help. Forgiveness. I don't know... something."
I suddenly felt like this had all been a dream, and that it was impossible for me to get help. Desperation welled up in me again. He looked intently with his blue eyes and started talking. I can't remember what he said, but as the talk started I began to get a sense of a light growing inside of me. A dim flicker that started to ignite inside, started to burn away at the blackness. Then there was a loud clattering from above, and daylight streamed down into the shaft upon us. He went silent and shielded his blue eyes, and I heard the sound of more boots stamping down the stairs.
"Come," he said. "We need to move."
We descended back into the tunnel complex again, as the sound of those boots on metal grew louder. For a brief second, strangely, mixed with that echoing sound, I thought I could hear, distantly, like a far-off promise, thousands of human voices, raised, as if singing, holding a chord. Unsure if this were a trick of my mind, I followed him again, through a series of further tunnels which took us to another metal mesh door. The sound of people running through the tunnels behind us was loud now, and he pushed up against the mesh, listening intently for movement on the other side before fumbling in his pocket for the keys and unlocking it. We dropped down onto the track and I felt him take my hand in the darkness.
"No lights," he whispered. "Eyes are watching. Stay close." He guided me through the blackness until we came to a siding where old carriages had been shunted and discarded. An engine was standing idle and he climbed up and opened it. Then we both slipped inside, and we waited in the darkness.
*
I don't know how long we waited. I drifted in and out of consciousness with The Healer sitting nearby, just visible in the tiny amount of light coming from the emergency lamps in the tunnel - a silent serene figure who seemed to be part of the darkness. As I watched him, my eyes grew heavy and I fell into an uneasy sleep in which uncertain shapes moved in the darkness, circling me and following me. Then, one shape sprang at me snarling with bared teeth, its bright eyes blinding me.
I woke to the clattering roar of a train rushing by. The engine we were in rocked in the air of the hurtling carriages. He eyed me intensely, with a strange, knowing look in his face - enigmatic - joyful.
"They've gone," he said. "We're back to normal. Come, I'll take you back to the station. Then I have work to do. Follow me, and mind where you step. We have three minutes after the next train passes. Ready?"
I nodded, and we waited at the trackside for the train to come. After it rushed by, we dashed down the tunnel the 500 or so meters to the light at the other end.
In the distance, I could see passengers on the platform. I watched him bound on ahead excitedly, climbing up the service ramp. I saw him briefly silhouetted as he leapt over the railing and onto the platform. He stood there for half a second, orienting himself. Then he suddenly looked left. Six uniformed figures pounced on him, tackling him, struggling and kicking and shouting, to the ground. One of them lifted a baton and struck him on the head, and I saw him flatten out, as if he were dead.
Then he was lifted, with his arms held out wide on either side of him, his head slumped on his chest, bleeding a little from his forehead, his legs crossed as they turned him round, his hair lifting a little in the wind sent rushing through the tunnel by an oncoming train.
I gave a shout - a roar that met the rush of air coming towards me with a furious voice, and I pounced on the railings and threw myself on the guards - dazed, confused and angry as I watched my hope being dragged away. I felt hard hands against my side, taking me in a well-rehearsed lock, and I did not register the oncoming blur of the train in the corner of my vision, as I tore with my hands at the face of the guard who had placed restraining arms around me. I kicked out and pushed hard away from him, and then I was falling down from the platform.
The train rushed towards me.
A shout came up from nowhere, as if a million voices had joined in unison to sing a single, terrible, devastating chord.
*
A kind of pandemonium broke out, in slow motion. People were running, shouting for a medic, others were looking down at me with wide, wide eyes. My senses were sharpened and heightened. I could see every grain of black dust, and hear every sound in the entire tube network. And in that intensity, I saw a person whose face I seemed to know. A woman. Who was that woman? It troubled me, and I didn't know why.
A medic knelt by my side, talking to me. I didn't really listen, and after a few seconds he went over to another man who appeared to be in charge. They spoke low and quietly, but I could hear everything. I could hear everything in the whole of London.
"How's he doing?"
The medic shook his head.
"He's a goner, sir."
"But you were talking to him..?"
"I've seen this type of injury before. When a body gets caught between a platform and a train, part of the body is caught, while the rest of the body is spun. His guts will be ruptured. As soon as they take the weight off him, the organs will just spill out. The only thing we can do is keep him comfortable to the end. And get him prepared."
I felt a sudden weariness with the events that were going on around me. No longer interested by the scene that was, after all, happening to another person, I wandered disembodied between the guards, who ignored my passing. I followed a line of travel inexorably upwards. I climbed the escalators, up from the platform, up towards the light. Somewhere, I could hear singing, like a host of angels, coming down to meet me from above - a beautiful, ecstatic harmony - and I could see sunlight, gushing, gushing down and splashing the ticket hall where I stood for a second or so, gawping in wonder at the beauty of it all. Then I wandered aimlessly out, passing through the barred entrance, passing through the uniformed guards, who shuddered as I walked.
There was a melee of 5,000 or so people outside the station, some in the park itself, others crowded around the entrance. Yet more of the uniformed men stood here, looking out warily from the station gates, intent on closing down joy, ending the happiness of the city.
The crowd was singing in a series of overlaid harmonies - strange, shifting, unearthly chords. But, as I drifted out, they fell silent, as if they could see me and were paying their respects. I knew that was impossible. I had taken off my flesh to go for this walk.
That throng had a strange intensity in it. As if a single electric current was animating them, or they were all compass needles swung to a magnetic point and fixed unerringly on it. I took in the scene and felt the mood. There was something ethereal in the air, as the crowd grew increasingly transfixed on Green Park station. Numbers swelled steadily, people answering a secret call, or following ancestral lines of travel that none consciously understood. The air stayed silent. Even the hooting of impatient horns on Piccadilly abated as the passengers turned their eyes expectantly towards the station. The uniformed officers grew uneasy and withdrew behind their gates as the intense and silent staring of the crowd began to take its toll on their morale.
Then, a single voice began to sing. It was a song of the joy that had been circling beneath the city for the last few months, the joy that had been building steadily and inexorably, and had brought these people here. The voice started low at first, and began to build, the lone sound in the park rising up among the leaves of the London Plane trees, caressing with a loving sound the feathers of the birds nested in the branches among the soft green leaves, and rising up and up till it was ringing in the clouds. As the voice went on, another joined it in its ecstasy, and another, and others too, until the weaving dancing sound of thousands of human voices lifted over London, sweeping through the streets, filling the sky with the sound of hope and joy, rebounding from the sun and bathing the world in glorious laughter and love, until the whole of the air seemed to ring with an ecstatic and rapturous sound that filled the cars on the streets, the offices and restaurants around, and rang out across the park in all directions, a shifting chord pulsing louder and louder and growing in intensity with each second.
Soon, hundreds of thousands of people across the city were singing with exultant voices. Singing, while those in Green Park were pulling at the gates that sealed the station; singing with not only joy, but a determination, a knowledge that they must act and act now.
It all seemed quite distant and unreal, I thought, and I lifted my eyes again. I floated upwards a little more, sitting on the branches of a London Plane tree, looking down from the leaves at the immense sea of people stretching away in all directions. I felt giddy, my head spinning, and I looked up at the sun, the sky blackening around it, until it seemed to be a tiny pinpoint of light towards which I could fly. I started to rise towards it, light and joyful, a feather on the breath of God.
Then a voice stopped me.
"You," she said to me as she caught sight of my face near the floor. "Oh my God, it's you!"
I woke from the dream to see her standing over me. The years, I admit, had been unkind to both of us. I was a slim good-looking teenager back then. Now, what was I? A broken middle-aged man, with bad skin and too much weight to port around comfortably, just about to die. But who was she?
"No autographs, no autographs," I joked, through the haze, feeling little but a sense of crushing numbness.
It was strange, looking up at her from the level of the platform. She got down on her knees to talk to me. "My God, I can't believe it's you again, here." Her voice, was filled with a fellow feeling at my predicament, but had an undertone of wariness. It was an odd mixture, and I looked at her more carefully. Something in her face flickered up a companion memory from my wasted years. A line in her jaw, the shape of her nose. That youthful mad mid-eighties groupie, jumping at a gig, smiling and giggling, arms out to me, flirting, smiling again.
I remembered something else about her, and I grimaced.
"No, no, no. Not now," I called out at the memory. I wasn't destined for the pinpoint of light above, I realised. I was being reminded of my sins, my failings, my abuses. That's why the powers-that-be had decided to kill me in the Underground. One elevator stop before the Underworld.
This was one of them. One of those women I had treated so badly. A girl. I remembered a girl of 16 coming to me and telling me about the child growing inside her. I remembered it all: the argument, the promise to stay by her side if she just got rid of it - the pledge: in the future we could have one - but not now - not on the edge of this new opportunity.
America, I remembered. I was going to break into America. I was facing superstardom, and I wasn't going to answer to a little groupie in a bedsit in Chiswick.
I promised I would be with her in the night when she got rid of it. I promised her so much. And when she got it done - the very minute I was satisfied that it was done, I was out of that clinic and on a plane to my real life.
I sobbed. Then I looked at her again.
"You must hate me," I said.
"I did," she answered. "I hated you for a long time. I hated the whole lot of you. But you know what's strange? You gave me a career. You gave me a life. I know that now."
By some strange coincidence, she was also the very journalist who had broken the Tube Healer story to the world. I had watched her career, and read her anger in the tossed-aside papers I had found on underground seats. I thought of all that misery she had filled her newspaper articles with. I remembered her friends hounding me in the years after my fall. Everything that had gone wrong, it all started with her. And she was down here, now, in for the kill. What did it mean?
"I am sorry. I am so sorry about everything."
She looked at me then and I saw her eyes brimming over. With pain, with love, with simple humanity. "I am bleeding," I said. "I feel weak. Very weak." She reached out and stroked my hair. Tenderly. Tenderly. And I felt that it was okay for me to go, if this was how it should be.
The medic came over to me and started talking into my face. He said a lot of stuff about lifting equipment, and did I believe in God, and was there anything I wanted. But I didn't really take it in. Across the platform from me, I noticed the Tube Healer had blinked back to consciousness. He was watching me with those bright blue eyes and that intent look on his face. I could hear the sound of singing coming from somewhere, filling my ears as a great wave of noise washed through the tube. "I do want something," I told the medic. "I want to talk to him." The medic nodded, and they brought him to me, handcuffed, pale, with blood on his face, and bruising on his cheek.
"I came to you to take away my pain," I said to him. "It didn't work out how I expected. But I am calm now. Calm," I said, my eyes glazing over.
"There is still pain in you," he said. "Your Dog. Shall we get him out, before we say goodbye?"
"I think it might be too late for that."
"Never too late, my friend. Never too late."
Then he started talking again. This time uninterrupted, and the singing echoing through the tunnels grew louder again, acting as a backing track to his voice. It felt surreal, as if the music that I had left behind me all those years ago had come back to me, now, in my final minutes. I felt the blood beneath me dripping out of me, and in my mind's eye saw it making a great black pool beneath the rails, a great black pool of my anger and hatred, of all the bad, evil selfish parts of me. So strange to be doing this now, I thought, lucid at the same time as knowing that I was dying.
The Dog. In my imagination I saw it grow, and take form - its red eyes, its bared fangs, its snarl, its dark essence... It all seemed more clear than ever I had known it before, as if a shadow were being coaxed into the light, and was able to hold itself solid, rather than shrink to nothingness. Darkness not only visible, but tangible. And I knew that it was at last leaving me - it was leaving my body just as I was about to leave my body.
Then, I suddenly felt a rising sense of disorientation, confusion, even startlement as something started pushing against me. Something big, and powerful, with solid muscular flanks. Something that breathed and panted and clawed and pawed and howled. Something that, of its own volition wanted to make its way up from the level of the rails.
And I supposed that I was hallucinating the red-eyed creature pushing from below me, squeezing out from between the platform and the train. And I supposed I hallucinated the growing look of panic on the faces of the guards as The Dog turned on them, and savaged them, and they pulled back in screaming fear at its fierce onslaught - its slavering jaws, the white foam around its mouth, the implacable hatred in its eyes focussed on those it saw as enemies of its master. Its master, who stood guiding its moves with small movements of his hand, and gave direction from nods of his head, and from the power in those deep blue eyes.
When I looked again, the guards lay on the ground, dead, and the Tube Healer was gone, and there was a crowd of people surging onto the platform - thousands of people in a sustained state of joy, pushing against the train, and the sound of singing grew louder and louder above it all. As hands laid hold of me, soothing and reassuring, I thought I could hear a great hound baying in the tunnel, and a laughter, a blue-eyed laughter ringing above everything, before I sank finally into a well of blackness.
*
There were rumours, just as there had been at the start of this. I heard them as I lay in my hospital bed, being puzzled over by doctors who told me that I was one of the luckiest men alive. They told me that the usual story about those caught between train and platform was very much as the medic on the platform had said: the body twists and the organs fail. Life is literally wrung out of the human form. But it appears that I had fallen just as the train stopped. So, no twisting. That was the explanation for my survival.
Not that I would have guessed that this was exactly the best outcome. Some doctors came in, looked at the scans and my records and occasionally said: "You should be dead..." as if I had somehow let them down. So, there was no miracle. No miracle at all, it turned out, just the press of people against the carriage, possibly some form of mass hysteria, that rocked the carriage off its rails as the people pressed and pushed hard against it. And I was pulled up and freed.
There was no mention of missing guards in the papers, so that must have been a hallucination, too, I suppose. It is true that over the next few weeks there were reports of higher-than-usual casualties of British troops in the Middle East involved in one or other of the post-Imperial campaigns they found themselves in.
As for me, I even managed a brief moment of celebrity once again. A government minister cited my near-death experience as justification for the extraordinary operation he admitted they had mounted on the Underground.
Mass hysteria. That was what had actually happened, apparently. Nothing that happened had been out of the ordinary. It was all mass hysteria.
The individually altered lives, the permanently altered pathways of people whose trajectories had been fixed in one direction until the point at which they imagined they met the Tube Healer - all this was down to the power of suggestion, caused by... newspapers. That was the government line. Newspapers had made it all happen by the power of suggestion. An investigation, would, they promised, be launched.
Other rumours said that those in power were frightened by the power of the Tube Healer, and wanted to bury his memory forever. They spoke of a clean-up job taking place throughout the city. Officially, no CCTV footage was ever found of him, and for some reason, mobile phone shots of him were always blurred. Then, thousands of images that were certainly not the Tube Healer appeared on websites, in blogs and on forums, as if someone, somewhere was trying to dilute the memory of him.
One rumour had it that the Tube Healer was a famous tv hypnotist doing a publicity stunt for his new show - and when he saw how out-of-hand his venture had grown, he had sloped away into the shadows. Another claimed that it was all a government experiment in mind control.
Others said it was all down to the Royal Family. But then, the ones who said that always said that, whenever anything unusual happened.
Others again noted how strange it was that a foreign-sounding guy called Blue-Eyed Bob had set up on a radio show in New Zealand helping people with problems. And wasn't it funny that Blue-Eyed Bob had just come back from a long trip to Europe?
Then there were the really way-out rumours. Jackie and I discussed them as she sat by my hospital bed. Jackie was the journalist. The woman I had once hurt. We were maybe never going to be the best of friends, but something now tied us together, a shared experience unique to us two. Our common bond was made up of the events on the platform that day. They overlaid older memories and grudges. So, she took me under her wing for a while, till I got myself back on my feet. It gave us a chance to discuss those strange events.
The theory that was circulating in the whackier parts of the internet was that the Tube Healer was the passengers' creation. Not in the sense of being imagined - but in the sense of being made up out of nothing. Every day, millions of people had travelled through the ground, in a trance-like state. Unhappy millions, unconsciously wishing for a better life, for a little touch of happiness, for some humanity on the tube. That desire, that need, so the theory said, had set up a resonance in the old tunnels, an unconscious call for salvation that had grown to tipping point with the opening of new lines. The earth had become saturated with a cry for help, and the ancient London Clay had spontaneously responded - forming out of itself a man who came among the passengers, and breathed life into their twisted forms. Helped them for a while to loosen their shackles. Helped them to be happy. Helped them throw off their mental chains.
It was just a theory.
The doctors who came and stood at the end of my bed, and tutted sometimes as Jackie and I talked about these wild ideas, clearly knew something different. They knew that miracles didn't happen. Not in the modern world. Everything had an explanation.
Jackie and I watched their reactions to our words, and learned to keep our own counsel till they were gone.
For Jackie had seen The Dog, just as I had. And when the train hit me, I had felt my body twist, and twist more - till the bones were sticking out through my skin, and my organs were sacks of pulped tissue. We both know what had really happened, and it wasn't what the doctors said.
As for proof, well, my proof is all around me.
This life I have now, free of The Dog, this new existence - this is not all in the mind, after all.
###
*
A Personal Message From The Author - and a freebie!
Before I tell you about another free ebook you can download as a gift from me to you, I would like to thank you for reading this book.
It has a history to it that you can read in my blog, under the category "Paul McKenna and Me", here: http://www.lifeisamazing.co.uk/category/paul-mckenna-and-me/.
It will shed a light on many of the events in this story.
*
If you liked The Tube Healer, please recommend it to others through facebook, twitter - or any other social media!.
*
Below you will also find extracts from my other books available online, these others being based in my island home of Portsmouth.
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Please look out for the following titles, which are either already published, or coming soon:
Turn The Tides Gently (extract below)
The Three Belles Star In "We'll Meet Again" (extract below)
Heaven's Light Our Guide (coming soon)
The Mystery of the Mustachioed Man and Other Stories (coming soon)
The Haydn Bomb (coming soon)
The Tourist (available free from my blog)
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Connect With Me Online
Twitter: TurnTheTidesGen
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matt.wingett
My blog, Life Is Amazing: http://www.lifeisamazing.co.uk/
*
Another Thank You
This story is special to me. It is the story that started me writing again, after 13 years of writer's block.
I'd like to say thankyou to Paul McKenna for that. Yes, the Paul McKenna, the hypnotist and personal development expert. In April 2008 I was attending a training course in Neuro-Linguistic Programming with him. At the time I was suffering a loss of belief in my writing ability that was so pronounced that I just couldn't write any more.
Paul demonstrated a hypnotic technique on me, and it unlocked my writing after years of stagnation. The first things I wrote after this were admittedly enthusiastic but crude - but Paul certainly did something to me that I have worked on ever since.
So, Paul, thanks for that. You gave me the ability to get back in touch with my creativity, and I am grateful.
You can find out more about learning the skills of NLP at http://www.nlplifetraining.com/
*
Some samples of my other work:
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Book Extract: The Opening to
Turn The Tides Gently
At first the hallucinations come to him in silence, as they always do. Carriages from a different era moving beneath starlight, then the sound of wheels clattering along the cobbles, and finally the pungent smell of horses, their dung on the floor, the acrid reek of piss - a rich, rancid perfume, overloading the senses.
It's as if he's looking through the surface of a soap bubble: figures walking the nightbound streets – uniforms of old soldiers not old any more, the police officer on the corner in a cape and high helmet. From across the Common, where the Royal Marines sleep in rows of tents before embarkation, a long-dead trumpet call from the older city briefly drowning the newly-wakened birds of the present.
Through the Pompey night, he heads along the island's streets to the shore. The spring sky is mottled with occasional clouds, and in the cold air he smells the smoke of a coal fire lit by a maid to warm a copper in a scullery. He even imagines he can hear the sleepy voices of her children, waking to a lightless pre-dawn.
As he steps onto the shingle beach, all shimmered upon and sparkling in the moonlight, a deep silence breaks out, as if an unseen attendant has closed a door behind him. The stillness holds for a few seconds, until he hears the sea again, and confirms the presence of the modern world: shimmering across the Solent, a ferry with its stacked decks lit up and looking like a wedding cake, all sparkling and iced.
I have visions, he says to himself. They always seem so real – realer than the world I really live in. He looks down at his hands, as if they might help him grasp things more tightly. Doctor Cassell tells me to ignore them. But I always know I'll get another one.
Sure enough, a new vision comes. But what he is seeing now is not like any previous hallucination. This is not a phantasm of buckets and spades – look daddy, see how the water splashes on the castle – not little constructions of remembrance that come from peering over the edge of the spiral of time, or half-memories drawn from tv costume dramas. This is different. He squints across the sea towards -
A woman. There's a woman in the sea! - with lank, long wet hair – there, in the moonlight!
Her breasts catch moonbeams and shimmer in the light – and then she is gone, vanished beneath the moon's silver path.
He glares an accusation at his trembling hands, bites his lower lip and shakes his head. Then he rubs his eyes and looks again, just to be sure. Nothing there, of course. Nothing. Except for an ever-widening circle spreading outwards, reaching towards him. He holds his breath and rubs his eyes once more. No. I imagined it.
The night's sounds intensify, and the moon's light brightens. Something's not right, he thinks. With minute accuracy, he can hear the gentle lapping of the waves on the shore, a restless sound, as if every bubble is speaking its own secret: Shush. Shush. Something hidden. She-ush.
A wavering glance across the sea is enough to satisfy him it's empty. Just water, he tells himself, only half-believing. But as he considers the long-diagnosed madness that conjured that image, she surfaces again.
Her head is up now, out of the water, her mouth in the soft ecstasy of what he thinks a woman drowning must look like: her arms raised out of the water seemingly helpless. He sees her like this for a second or so, frozen in time. Then down she goes again.
He is riveted to the spot in disbelief. After maybe two minutes under the water she surfaces a third time. It's impossible! But no, perhaps not. A scenario flashes before his mind's eye. A clubber, maybe, a little high on drugs; she took a playful dive in the water, and here she is – drowning in front of my eyes! She's real!
He shouts – breaking across the night's sounds with a voice sounding strangely thin and flat over the sea, as if he is shouting in a padded room.
“It's okay. Don't worry! I'll help...”
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