First Post can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/s/fhhjwZyBRC
Since my last post gained some traction, I thought I’d share another story from when I was on duty. I mentioned in a previous comment that there was an incident on the tube I responded to.
I have had people swing bladed weapons at me, I have put down several people with my taser. I’ve even had a John Doe disappear into thin air. All of this paled in comparison when I had to go down into the underground and look for a missing person.
Let’s rewind back 8 months. It was a hot august day near Elephant and castle. If you have never been, it’s a very built up area with lots of tarmac, bricks and concrete, so the heat really magnifies and gets unbearable in August. It’s early afternoon on a Thursday, most people were idly thinking of the beer gardens from their office cubes. The heat is utterly unbearable. The only up-side is we were on a day-shift this time.
I am on patrol with PC Khan in this tropical hellscape that is summertime London. To make things worse, we are on armed patrol. To non-Brits, it’s a myth that the UK Police don’t carry guns. With additional training, officers can carry firearms if necessary. We are both Authorised Firearm Officers (AFO for short). I was only carrying a Glock pistol, but PC Khan pulled the short straw, and was carrying an MP5 submachine gun, with several magazines on his heavy webbing. He must have been cooking.
Elephant and Castle is a bit of a dump. It’s still eye-wateringly expensive to live there, bearing in mind, however it’s not the nicest area of London. Normally you see a lot of homeless at this time of the day, some of them are barely able to walk straight so early in the afternoon. However, most must have been hiding away from the sun, as there were very few people about on that afternoon. You could hear the rustling of litter in the warm gentle breeze.
‘’Place is a ghost-town’’ Khan remarked. He had a way of stating the bleeding obvious.
‘’Aye, lets enjoy the quiet’’ I said, hoping he would take the hint that I was too hot and bothered to chat idly.
‘’Could do with a cold Fanta, no wait, actually I could do with a choc Ice’’. He continued unaware.
‘’Mhmm, I could to’’ I responded. Sometimes its better to give something back.
Mercifully, the radio went, putting me out of my misery.
‘’Nearest patrol head for Elephant and Castle station, there has been an incident on the platform’’.
‘’We’ve got this one dispatch’’ I replied. It was likely a heat-stroke victim given the weather.
We are just around the corner from the station, so we walk quickly over, enter, and to our dismay, find out the lifts are out of action.
‘’No wonder why they collapsed, poor person had to take the stairs!’’ I angrily objected. I was sure to be hot and sticky after this descent.
We clamber down the steep spiral staircase for what seems like an eternity. This line is very deep, over 20 metres below the surface.
With a few false-steps, we manage to get to the bottom without falling flat on our arses. It felt even hotter down underground that it did above. There was an insufferable current of warm, thick air that smelt of scorched rubber from the locomotive brakes.
We emerged on the platform and there was a man and woman in hysterics. They were the only people we saw down on the platform. English was not their first language, but we managed to meet them in the middle through Khan’s basic grasp of Urdu.
‘’They say something took a girl off the platform Sergeant’’ Khan translated in slight disbelief, pointing the filthy mouth of the tunnel.
At this stage, I hoped that the two had collective hysteria from heatstroke. Unfortunately, they seemed well.
I called dispatch on the tube phone (we were underground, so our radios didn’t work) to see if we could get anymore insight on the situation.
Ten minutes later, they called back saying that we had the all-clear to go onto the tracks. For 15 minutes, it had been arranged for the trains on the Bakerloo Line to halt whilst we investigated.
Khan and I peer at the entrance of the tunnel. In response, we feel the dirt filled plume of warm air blow in our faces.
‘’Human skin. Thousands of pounds of human skin, we’re breathing this shit in.’’ I stated the facts to my colleague. I could see him gag visibly.
‘’look. Is that hand prints?’’ Khan states. I saw what he meant, there was a hand print in the soot by the tunnel entrance. It could have easily been a tourist who didn’t know not to lean against any surface on the tube, it could also belong to the victim. The print was smeared. Almost as if the person was dragged into the tunnel.
I hopped down onto the track, and turned my torch on. Our radios were useless this deep underground.
The sound of the outside world evaporated when we crossed the tunnel mouth. A silence gripped the air.
We carried on walking for a while, minding where we put our feet. There was a lot of trackwork on the ground. The walls were circular, which made it hard to lean against for support.
Despite the disruption, we still anticipated a train to arrive. It was an irrational fear that I had in that deep dark tunnel that few people try and enter.
‘’Khan, take a look at this’’ I whispered, I was aware of how far my voice carried.
I found service door. The door creaked loudly when I opened it. When the door inched open, I saw that it opened into the abyss. There was a void behind the opening, a void with colder air.
I walked gingerly through the doorframe with my torch in hand.
Inside the doorway was another tube tunnel. This one looked very old, and did not have any wiring on the tracks. After this incident, I looked up online the History of the Bakerloo line, the oldest tunnels date from the 1890s, meaning this tunnel could have been over a hundred years old. At the time, all I knew was this tunnel was safer to use, just in case we spent more than 15 minutes lost in this tunnel.
Khan and I walked in the same direction for about ten more minutes.
That was until we heard noises up ahead.
My hair was standing up on its ends.
I aimed my torch at the direction of the sound. I peered into the darkness.
I could see something hunched over, moving.
It then turned its face to meet ours.
‘’get that light out of my face!’’ it shrieked.
It sounded like a woman, underneath all the dust, I could see her eyes, and her matted hair. She looked ancient.
‘’What the hell are you doing down here? Don’t you know how dangerous it is?’’ Khan said angrily to the old woman.
‘’I have come down here for many years love, it’s safer for me down here than it is up there’’. She said quietly. ‘’My name is Sally’’.
‘’PC Khan, and this is Bus_Wrangler’’ Khan gave our names easily, which I was very annoyed at. We had no idea who we were dealing with.
‘’What are you doing with those shopping bags?’’ I demanded.
‘’Lots of us live down here love, it never rains, is mostly quiet, and can live in peace, every so often one of us goes up to get groceries. Today it was my turn’’. Sally explained.
I was growing uneasy with this older woman, it still didn’t add up why she was down here. It didn’t make sense that she was alone. One thing struck me deeply. Why was Sally leaving open food on the tracks?
‘’What are you doing, Sally?’’ I asked.
‘’I am leaving food for them love. My mother used to come down here and shelter during the war. She was a very superstitious lady. If she left an offering in this tunnel, she was left alone when sheltering from the bombs. If an offering was not left, less people would come out of the shelter than would come in.’’ she said solemnly.
I was in disbelief, as a sceptical person I didn’t believe in bogeymen. But how did a young woman get snatched off the platform? I was growing more uneasy as time went on. The possibility of something down here really scared myself and Khan. Something dwelt down here, people were feeding it. Perhaps people were feeding them.
That was when I heard the screams. Screams that sounded like animals, but also human like.
Sally, ran past us back up the tunnel. We took this as our cue to leave. We ran back the way we came, our hearts pumping. We bolted through the service door. Before shutting it, we could see several things on all fours crawling unnaturally towards us, they looked remarkably human like, coated in the dust that covered Sally.
Khan slammed the door shut before we got a better look.
We manged to find our way back to the station. We could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We crawled back onto the platform, much worse for wears and called in the missing person case.
‘’What the fuck was that?’’ Khan said to me.
Sometimes, its best to ask as few questions as possible.
We called the incident in. Patrols went through the tunnels, and found about two dozen homeless people. It turns out they had a shelter in the tunnels and tapped into the electric and water mains to get some of the essentials for comfy living. They also found the food left out, it was all gone besides the wrappers. The homeless people were out in temporary accommodation, and nothing came of them living in the tunnels.
The alleged missing person was never found, the security cameras were not working due to the extreme heat, so no footage exists of the person being snatched off the platform. We don’t even know if this woman ever existed. There were no traces left behind, besides some smudged hand prints on the wall of the tunnel.
I for sure know what I saw. I think that several things lived in those tunnels for a long time. Long before the war. Local people are feeding them, but every so often, another person goes missing around that area without a trace. They are just part of the missing persons statistics.