Part I

Don’t ask me to explain what happened.   I can’t.   Believe me, I’ve tried—every day for half a year I’ve tried, since the night last October when it happened.   I’ve given up trying.   It happened, that’s what’s important.   And don’t try to tell me that I was dreaming or drunk or something, or that I imagined the whole thing.   I was there, I was wide awake and stone sober.   Maybe not quite stone sober, but that’s not the point.   Don’t ask me to explain, I’ll just tell the story and you figure it out.
     It happened last October, two days before Halloween.   But don’t think Halloween had anything to do with it either, because it didn’t.   Halloween is just a day.   Maybe a long time ago strange things happened around Halloween, but if you believe all the old stories, strange things happened pretty much every night a long time ago.   Don’t think I’m naive enough to think that Halloween today is any more than a bunch of punk kids in superhero masks, because I’m not.
     Anyway, it happened last October, on a nasty cold night in the West End of London.   I know that sounds like a cliché, but it isn’t.   I was in London on a business trip, to attend a bunch of   technical meetings with people who are a lot smarter than I am.   I’m not going to get into what we were talking about, because I don’t want to and it really doesn’t matter.   Just know that I’m an engineer.   I’m a very practical person, or at least I like to think so.   That’s why what happened that night doesn’t make any sense.
     We’d stopped by a pub after work, for a bit of relaxation after a hard day’s sitting in meetings.   Nobody wanted dinner, really—it’s hard to work up an appetite when you’re eight time zones off and you’ve barely moved all day.   But a brew is always welcome, especially a good stout British brew in a real London pub.   It was bloody cold and damp that night, and we needed to warm up.   A good beer in London almost counts as a meal, anyway.
     Maybe I should have gone back to the hotel like the rest of them, when the beer ran out.   But I didn’t want to.   I wasn’t tired at all, and the beer had barely touched my head.   I felt like walking mostly, felt like stretching my legs and seeing a bit of the town.   Maybe I was a little hungry, I don’t remember.   Anyway, when the others drifted toward bed, I wished them good night and went the other way.
     We’d arrived in London four days before.   I’d never been there before, but I’d seen a whole lot of other places, and London by comparison seemed fairly benign.   At least the locals spoke the right language, which when you travel a lot can be a rare treat.   They all spoke it funny, with an accent that reminded me constantly of an old girlfriend I’ve never quite forgotten about, but that’s irrelevant.   I figured I could get around London all right.
     The pub was just off Oxford Street near Hyde Park, in the part of downtown London called the West End.   It’s the part of town that includes Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden, about a thousand old theaters and a maze of crooked streets that make a plate of spaghetti look logical.   I figured I’d just walk for a while.   It was the sort of murky cold night that everybody tells you London is famous for, but that you can’t appreciate until you go there and feel it yourself.   Sort of a not-quite-freezing, not-quite-raining clammy damp that seeps through your clothes and sticks in your lungs, and that makes you smell like a soggy sheep if you happen to be wearing a wool coat.
     I really did just mean to walk.   Oxford Street was busy with people, and nobody seemed to much mind the damp and cold.   Vendors were all about, hawking roasted nuts and slices of limp-looking pizza and who-knows-what else from tiny wheeled carts.   I skirted un inexplicably long line at a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream shop, and nearly collided with a teenage girl in a long leather coat as she licked distractedly at something far too cold to be eaten that time of year.   Endless lines of tall red busses and beetle-shaped taxi cabs rattled down the street and splashed through the curbside puddles as if their sole purpose was to soak the damp masses on the sidewalks.
     Everything seemed perfectly normal.   I’ve never thought about it until right now, but everything and everyone on Oxford Street was perfectly, ridiculously normal.   Cars were passing on the street, people were talking and laughing, vendors were hawking whatever.   You don’t notice things as normal when they are normal, because things are supposed to be normal.   You only notice normal when things go really weird.
     I’m not sure exactly why I entered the subway.   I vaguely remember thinking I wanted to see a new part of the city, but I don’t know if I ever had a plan for where to go.   I’ve tried to remember because I think it’s important, but if the memory ever existed it’s gone now.   I’ve done that before, in other cities—just started walking without much thought or any sort of a plan, and figured out where I was after I got there.   So it really wasn’t a big deal to get on the subway without a plan.   All I remember now is that one moment I was on the street, munching roasted Brazil nuts from a tiny paper sack I’d bought from a vendor in a green wool cap and catching icy drips in my collar from an overhead shop awning, and in the next moment I was in the Tube station, rattling down an escalator into the bowels of the city.
     I like London’s subway.   It’s old and the age shows, but the stations are a lot cleaner than they could be and the whole thing seems fairly well taken care of.   Maybe someone who has to ride it to work every day would disagree, but it seems organized and efficient for the huge space it has to cover.   And I like the old stone and the tile and the general Victorian look of the thing.   But that doesn’t matter.
     The platform was quiet and mostly deserted.   The air was hazy, sort of dusty, like one of those really bad techno nightclubs pumped full of fake white smoke.   Nobody else seemed to notice, but not many people there and they didn’t seem to notice much of anything.   I took my glasses off and wiped them on my shirt, but the haze didn’t go away.   A train was coming—I could hear it roaring somewhere deep in the tunnel, could feel the rush of cold, stale air pushed before it.   I finished the last of my Brazil nuts, crinkled the bag into a ball and tossed it beneath the wheels of the train.   Nobody noticed, nobody cared.   There was a trash bin right behind me, but I figured the rats could use the crumbs.
     I don’t know how long I’d have stayed on the train if we hadn’t had the beer.   It’s always night in the subway anyway.   Probably I’d have stayed until we reached a stop with an interesting-sounding name, then got off.   Sometimes that’s the best way to explore, just to go somewhere you’ve never heard of before and start walking.   Sometimes it’s also a good way to find big trouble in a hurry.
     I was alone in the car but for a young couple at the far end, and they were too engrossed in each other to care about me.   The haze from the station seemed to have entered the train as well, and I sunk into a bench and breathed it in, with my shoulder resting lightly against a red steel pole.   The girl giggled softly from somewhere far away.
     Maybe I’d have sat there all night, listening to those two lovers, staring through grimy windows at blackness and seeing only my reflection.   But two stops out the beer grabbed my bladder and squeezed, and that was about the end of the trip.   I stood up as the train slowed, forgot to hold the red pole when it stopped, and bucked forward heavily and loudly into another row of seats.   The fellow down the car looked up from his girl and realized I’d been watching them, but before he could react I was out the half-opened door, aiming for the surface and looking for anywhere that might serve as a bathroom.
     I got out of the tunnel at Holborn Station and onto a street called Kingsway.   The rain hadn’t quit, but the fog was down thicker and an icy wind had picked up.   I hurried away from the station, dodging puddles, fighting to keep my bladder from exploding and cursing the beer I’d enjoyed so much only an hour before.   A pub appeared, a dingy, dirty place called The George with cigarette smoke floating out of its open door and a fresh-painted image of King George the Who-Knows-What on the sign in front.   Nobody cared when I hurried inside and disappeared to the back.
     The place was half full of sullen, unhappy-looking men staring silently into pints of ale or at an overhead television blaring soccer.   I guess it was really a football game since I was in England, but it doesn’t matter.   No one spoke but a dark-faced old man in a frayed black overcoat and a greenish tweed cap, the sort of cap that looks like an American baseball cap with the logo piece pulled forward and stitched onto the bill, the hat your English grandfather used to keep in the closet and wear sometimes when he went out.   He was wearing his coat and hat at the bar, which I suppose was strange but I didn’t really think about it at the time.   Anyway, this old fellow was alone, and whoever he spoke with, only he could see.   I heard his voice as I passed, saw him shakily raise a glass of something dark and put it down without drinking.   But the blaring television just above his head obscured his words.
     No one looked at me, no one so much as turned their heads as I crossed the bar and stepped again into the rain-darkened street.   At the door I glanced backward for a last look.   The football announcer screamed, the men drank and didn’t seem to care.   The old man at the bar sat as he had before, hunched slightly forward, one thin hand wrapped around the beer glass as if to steady himself.   But he no longer spoke, and as I looked I saw him slowly turn his head.   I saw his eyes—dark, strange eyes, disconcertingly lucid—staring at me without blinking from deep inside the emotionless mask of his ancient face.
     I stepped into the fog and began to walk.

To be continued.