"Michael Marshall Smith - Missed Connection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Michael Marshall)

progressed a few yards from the bottom of the steps he was in pitch darkness, unable to discern any features ahead of
him whatsoever. Although he was reasonably confident that the stairs were accessible from this platform somewhere,
he had no real idea how far along they were. If he went down the wrong corridor, he could search for ages and not
find them, all the time getting further away from any area that he had a rough mental picture of.
After about twenty careful yards he stopped. This was no bloody good. He was in utter darkness, with no idea of
how far, or indeed in which direction, he should go. The more he tried to remember, the more the undifferentiated
blackness pressed in upon him. He could recall less and less which corridor the stairs came off, and whether, once in
the right corridor, there were several choices of sub-corridor, and which of those he should take. The route ahead of
him тАУ which would have been so simple with light, or perhaps even without it if he hadn't been so worked up тАУ had
now begun to fragment in his mind, left and right merging into one.
He had lost confidence in the whole idea of the stairs.
Almost immediately the possibility of going down on to the line occurred to him. It wouldn't be that far to walk:
Goodge Street was only a few hundred yards further down Tottenham Court Road, and there he would be back into
light and sanity. Even the thought of being suffocated in a press of Italian shoppers and German tourists was
beginning to seem attractive.
Lawson wiped his forehead with his sleeve, feeling hot and extremely bothered. He couldn't go down the tunnel.
Not only was it more traipsing off into total darkness with no clear sense of where he was going, but what if a train
came along? He had no idea how wide the tunnel was once it got out of the station, or how much room for manoeuvre
there was between it and a passing tube. The idea of being the fall-guy in an enactment of the old joke about the light
at the end of the tunnel being an oncoming train didn't really appeal.
He slowly backed up, turned around, and shuffled back the way he'd come. He'd get to the stairs, go back up to
the escalators, and think about it there. There was probably some simple solution that he couldn't think of because he
was feeling put upon, and not entirely well.
Once he was back in the light everything would seem clearer.
When he reached the stairs he immediately felt more confident, and trotted up them, relieved that here at least the
lights were still working. The clacking of his heels, unnerving only minutes before, was now reassuring in its direction
and purpose. Well, purpose, at least.
Back at the foot of the escalators, Lawson drew to a halt and took stock. Clearly things were significantly out of
line. The Northern Line, if not shut, was certainly not operating a full service. The Victoria Line was, or at least had
been: Lawson toyed with the idea of checking to see if the lights were still on down there. He decided that it was not
germane to his purpose, and also that he'd rather not know if they weren't.
Either way, there was a problem with exiting Warren Street station, and given that, it was fairly logical that they
should have shut down parts of the station. It was not logical that they should have dumped him at the wrong end of
a platform in a station which appeared to be shut. After over ten minutes, he realised, he had still seen no other
passengers.
He could feel that parts of the problem were resolvable, their solutions tugging distantly at his mind, and felt that
his inability to grab hold of some central dilemma and solve it was important. But he had no clear idea why he felt that,
or of what the central dilemma was, so it wasn't much help. Instead he turned his mind to the more immediate problem
of how to get himself to the point where he was just another Christmas shopper, i.e. out on to the bloody street.
There appeared to be only one possible solution. The escalator. Although broken and submerged under debris, it
was a straightforward route up to the entrance, and unlike the stairs, he would be starting only one level down from
the street. The question of why the entrance should appear to be so dark was a little worrying, but one that could
safely be postponed, and which he would have to deal with whatever way he managed to get up there.
Lifting one rope of the barrier up and pushing the other down, Lawson slid between the two. Tentatively putting
one foot on the bottom step he tested it to make sure that whatever was wrong with the escalator wasn't something
that was going to make scaling it hazardous. It felt reassuringly solid. The next few steps were a bit more problematic,
as Lawson had to dislodge a number of cans before he could even get his foot on the steps properly.
By the time he was about half-way up it was quite hard going against all the rubbish, and he was in semi-darkness.
Something brushed against his foot and he kicked it away vigorously: from the harsh flapping sound it made he
realised it had been only newspaper. It was as if someone had upended a skipful of rubbish down the escalator.