Without my conscious effort, one of my feet moved, and suddenly I was going down the steps, away from the world, from everything that was safe. A few steps down, I heard the dripping for the first time. This got louder and louder as I went. The only other sound was a strange, faint whistling—the echo of air passing through from ventilation fans and air-conditioning units and the other tunnels that made up this vast network under the city. This was the true Underground. I started to get dizzy from the spiral, from the sameness of it all. Then the spiral stairs stopped and turned into a straight set of stairs, maybe twenty or twenty-five in all.

“Please come down,” said a voice. “Be careful on the last steps. They aren’t in very good condition.”

I froze in position. Now my brain remembered that it was supposed to be afraid. Stephen was still just one step behind me—he put his hand on my shoulder.

“No point in stopping,” the voice said.

He was right. I was so deep now that going back wasn’t an option anymore. This was the point where Stephen had to let me go on my own. He nodded to me, removing the flashlight from his belt and gripping it together with his terminus.

I took these last steps very slowly. They widened as I got nearer to the bottom, and they ended in what must have been the old entryway, where you bought tickets. The old ticket stalls were boarded up. Some of the tiling had been stripped away from the walls. There were a lot of modern safety notices stuck around, along with much older notices about smoking and nerve gas. Two arches opened in front of me. Pointing at each one was a crumbling cartoon picture of a hand, a little bit of the original Victorian decoration to direct the flow of traffic on and off of the platform. They probably looked nice at the time, but now they were unspeakably creepy.