FICTION: Passenger X

Do not alight

On 4 September this year, as a result of a door malfunction, Passenger X was able to disembark at a disused ThamesLink platform when the 20:51 from St Pancras to Bedford was briefly held at a signal on the approach to Farringdon. They did so despite the presence of a substantial amount of do-not-alight (DNA) signage. This was observed by the driver and by the control room via CCTV. Passenger X then left via a platform exit that was supposed to be caged off and locked. Subsequent inspection showed that the cage and padlock were both in place. Passenger X did not exit the station at ground level and a thorough search by London Underground staff and British Transport Police has found no trace. A limited description of Passenger X has been circulated along with images extracted from CCTV.

The electric chair

The photograph, taken on an iPhone by a Dutch tourist, on the Victoria Line between Oxford Circus and Green Park, shows a distinct human figure on the other side of the carriage window, in the darkness of the tunnel. The person in the photograph appears to be staring into the carriage, mouth open, hands up and splayed on either side of their pale, rather elongated face. It has been compared to the 1983 Karen Collett photograph which apparently shows somebody being executed in an electric chair in a darkened Bakerloo line tunnel. In both cases, an advertising poster is suspected to be the root of the phenomenon.

Crush zone

On the night of 3 March 1943, 174 people were crushed to death sheltering from an air raid at Bethnal Green tube station. I know this because I read about it, and obsessed over it, as a nervous child. The fluorescent light there is impure, green-tinted, making every passing commuter look like a corpse. We avoid each other’s eyes, coming and going, most of us, so I notice the man who looks directly at me. I see his open mouth and the palms of his hands, which seem to be flattened, as if pressed against an invisible sheet of glass. There is something he wants to say. I want to ask him a question, I’m not sure what question, or why, but I’m pulled along in the crowd and out into the daylight. Someone is smoking weed. A car passes with loud music playing. My phone rings.

Lost and found

Found in an alcove in a southbound Northern Line tunnel between Euston and Warren Street: one rucksack, red; one A5 hardback notebook, partially filled, used as a diary; one fountain pen, cartridge expired; one hand-drawn map comprising 40 sheets of A4 paper taped together, showing the locations of tube stations, main tunnels and service tunnels; one diagram, possibly of an electrical circuit, unlabelled, laminated. British Transport Police and security services aware.

Van Kappelle’s unused tiles

British-based Dutch artist Piet Van Kappelle was commissioned to design tiles for one of the stations in the planned southward extension of the Victoria Line. The designs he submitted to the London Underground design office in March 1973 were rejected and caused Van Kappelle to be removed from the list of approved craftsmen and designers for LU projects. Asked about this several years later, he said he had only followed the brief received in the post. For their part, the LU design team denied having sent Van Kappelle such a brief. The documents he shared to corroborate his story – eight foolscap sheets in a manila envelope sealed with a string toggle of the type then used for LU internal mail – spoke about energy fields, the repelling force of magnets with matching poles, circuits and loops, and so on.

Death Line AKA Raw Meat

I swear to god I’ve never seen that film. I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I know is, I was waiting on the Northern Line – southbound, yeah, right – and I saw someone coming out of the tunnel and onto the platform. Crawling. Kind of… oozing? No, not dirty. Very clean. Totally bald, completely white head. Dressed in a suit, I think, and maybe a black coat. No, they didn’t say anything. Nothing I could hear. I don’t know what happened next. I got out of there. I got a bus. Two hours, the bus took. Two hours!

The banshee scream

Mechanical friction noise has long been a problem on the Jubilee Line as a result of rail corrugation and friction over curves. A long-running joke among London Underground personnel is that it resembles a person screaming, or a chorus of screams. A review of CCTV footage from the weeks preceding the disappearance of Passenger X found numerous instances of the same individual aboard noisy stretches of the Jubilee Line apparently screaming in unison with the train. The CCTV is without audio but the footage was cross-referenced against staff reports and customer complaints, two of which referred to Passenger X as “singing” or “harmonising” with the screech of the rails.

An American Werewolf in London

Yes, I’ve seen it, who hasn’t? It was nothing like that, apart from the escalator. It wasn’t… He wasn’t chasing me. He wanted help. He was lost. But I was going up and he was down at the bottom, lying on the ground, crawling towards the escalator with his hands out. His fingers were long, too long, like those cheap candles you use during a powercut. I told someone up top and they said they’d check it out. Did they check it out? Is he OK?

Inspector Sands

At 20:58 on 11 September maintenance workers accessing the storage area in the tunnel extension south of Brixton reported an electrical blackout followed by an unrecorded, unauthorised and non-standard Inspector Sands announcement. One of them recorded a brief snippet using their phone. The recording backs their collective assertion that the announcement was in the same voice as the usual Inspector Sands fire warning, with a similar audio quality, but the words spoken were something like “Inspector Sands cannot find the exit” or “Inspector Sands cannot reach the exit”. Monitoring has been established but no repetition of the incident has occurred.

Extract from the diary of Passenger X

The escalator is not working which means I have to walk up it, struggling with the deeper than usual steps. I know it isn’t working, I know that when I step off it will just be like reaching the top of a normal staircase. But, still, I feel a lurch, a jolt, and stumble as I transition from one surface to another. In some small way, it feels like a near-death experience. The tube is full of moving parts, and non-moving parts, and tunnels, and closed tunnels, and spaces between the two. They say “mind the gap” but what if that gap is where I need to be?

Flashover

I saw the man again at King’s Cross, on the Piccadilly Line escalator. I’ve always been nervous there, since I was a kid, since the fire, since the evening of 18 November 1987 when 31 people died. I was going down, on my way home; he was coming up. The advertising screens behind him blacked out one by one as he passed and he looked straight at me. I knew the question I wanted to ask this time: Where will it happen, and how do I stop it? But I couldn’t ask it, not with all those people around. He mouthed something I couldn’t understand by lip reading, and I couldn’t hear him, not from behind his wall of glass.

Note from the diary of Passenger X

Stray current… imperfect insulation of running rails… asymmetric distribution of traction current and poor rail-to-ground conditions of traction power supply system… closed metro tunnels… new conductive pathways… accumulation of carbon dust… traction reflux leaking from rail into ground, creating stray current… running rails as current return path… increases leakage current… (Makeyaw et al, Energies)

The ghosts of the Elizabeth Line

Within weeks of its opening, clean and gleaming, ghosts began to appear on Elizabeth Line platforms – smudges of dirt on the white walls behind benches, human shaped, shadows from the grease and dirt of thousands of bodies and thousands of heads. Cleaning was intensified. It didn’t work. Eventually, large decorative vinyl stickers were applied to the walls to conceal the ghosts, and prevent further staining. Mercy Owoyomi, a late night cleaner, swears she has seen one of the ghosts stand up and drift towards the platform edge. She says she’s seen it pass through the glass and be rushed away like smoke in the wind. Mercy only tells this story to her closest friends, in the break room, in a language the supervisor cannot understand. Mercy doesn’t want to be thought mad.