The Fog - James Herbert [121]
Not bothering to pull the door shut again, he restarted the stalled engine and swung the car round, heading down the slope, narrowly missing the head that had come to rest in the middle of the road. He corrected his turn and held the car steady, the door on his other side swinging shut with the momentum. He didn’t want to stop; he didn’t want to think. He just wanted to get away.
A black hole opened up ahead of him and he suddenly found himself swallowed up by darkness. Once again, his foot hit the brakes, and the car screeched to a halt. He looked around in panic but could see only blackness ahead and to his sides. He remembered the decapitated body behind him and turned swiftly as though to assure himself that it was still lying prone. Grey light flowed in from a high square arch about thirty yards back and he saw that the body had slumped to the floor behind the front seats. He looked up again at the light and then he realized what had happened. He had driven into a tunnel! He should have realized it instantly, but because of circumstances, everything that happened seemed abnormal.
A tunnel! And suddenly it came to him which tunnel.
‘The Blackwall Tunnel,’ he said aloud. It had to be; they’d been driving in that direction, into the City, through Aldgate, down Commercial Road towards Poplar. The road he had just driven down must have been a ramp leading into the tunnel from the main road. The long winding tunnel stretched beneath the Thames to the south side of London, cutting out miles of snarled-up roads for motorists who would otherwise have had to use distant bridges. There were two tunnels in fact, running parallel to one another but completely separated; the old, built in the 1890s, and the new, completed in the late 1960s, one for the northbound traffic, the other for southbound. Holman was in the old tunnel, used for access to the north. He would use it himself now and get back to Westminster by following the river along its southern side. For a full minute he debated whether to go back to his flat, collect Casey, and get the hell out of London, but he finally dismissed the thought because he knew really there was no choice.
Before he made his way back, there was one thing he would have to do: get rid of the grotesque figure on the floor behind him. He opened the side door and got out, pulling the driving seat forward so he could reach the body, the old car being a two-door model. He could have switched the car’s headlights on to give him more light, but he had no desire to see too clearly what he was doing; the dim light from the opening further back would suffice for his purposes. He groped around until he found the tied ankles and gave the body a tug, finding it surprisingly light as it came out smoothly. He avoided touching anything but the woman’s ankles; the thought of coming in contact with her headless shoulders made him feel nauseous. He pulled the body to the side of the tunnel then straightened up and wiped his hands down the sides of his jacket to rid himself of the feel of her cold flesh. Looking down into the depths of the tunnel as he did so, he was forced to blink his eyes to clear them.
Was it his imagination, or was it lighter down there? The underground passage was filled with fog but much less than there was above ground so his vision was not seriously hindered, and his eyes had become fairly accustomed to the gloom. He was sure, there was light coming from ahead, from around a bend, but it couldn’t be daylight, for the exit would be at least a quarter of a mile away on the other side of the river and there were more bends that would diminish any daylight coming from that source. The only other possibility was that there was another car down there with its headlights full on. Before he drove any further into the tunnel, he would have to investigate; he was reluctant to run into more trouble again. Cautiously, quietly, he began to walk down the tunnel towards the eerie light.
It grew brighter at his approach, a strange yellowish light, reminding him of the light he’d come