Crawlers

11:46pm

Jasmine passed through another set of doors and entered a dimly lit room. Rising to her right were twelve rows of empty seats. A metal frame holding a lighting rig hung from the ceiling. 

The Pit was a theatre. It wasn't anything like as big and impressive as the one upstairs, nor was it supposed to be: this was a studio theatre, used for smaller-scale, more intimate productions. 

'There's a story about this place and how it got its name,' said Lauren's mouth. 'They say the Barbican was built on one of London's plague pits - a mass grave for victims of the Black Death.' 

Helplessly Jasmine followed Lauren across the performance space, through a gap in a blackout curtain and into the Pit Theatre's backstage area. Jasmine passed some painted wooden boards and a pile of steel scaffolding poles - theatrical scenery of some kind, apparently abandoned in mid-construction. In the far wall, flanked by two open, plain, black doors with signs on them saying WARNING: AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY, she saw a tunnel. 

'Elements of that story are true,' said the voice. 'The Barbican Centre is built over a pit. The pit was dug at the time of the Great Plague - the epidemic that ended in sixteen sixty-six. As to what the pit really contains, however... well, you're about to find out.' Lauren's body stood to one side of the tunnel entrance, and gestured. 'After you.' 

The tunnel was a twenty-metre-long downward-sloping tube of bare, grey Barbican concrete. The air coming up from it was cold and damp and smelled of sewage. The tunnel did not seem to Jasmine like a good place to be. But her reluctance made no difference: her legs began to plod down it just the same. 

'Sixteen sixty-six,' the voice behind her repeated. 'The Great Fire of London. If even Lauren here knows the date all British schoolchildren must do, one imagines. But what you don't know is that the fire was started deliberately.' 

The tunnel's slope was too steep to walk down comfortably: with each step Jasmine's toes pressed hard against the ends of her school shoes, and her ankles and calves quickly began to ache. While she waited to arrive wherever her stolen body was taking her, Jasmine thought about Lauren. Had there been some clue, some giveaway word that Jasmine could have picked up on earlier? Perhaps. But, Jasmine wondered bleakly, how could she have known? To Jasmine, Lauren had always just been Samantha's pet - sucking up to Samantha in return for the protection of being with her. Jasmine had never felt any wish to get to know Lauren well enough to have noticed anything different about her tonight. Neither, it seemed, had Samantha. 

'The city's owners, the Corporation of London, started the blaze to flush me out,' the voice went on. 'Imagine it: a whole city on fire for three days! I never could have guessed they would go to such lengths. But it worked. Here, under what is now called the Barbican Estate, is the northernmost point the fire reached. They had destroyed my hiding places, forced me out into the open. This was where they caught me.' 

Jasmine had reached the end of the tunnel. To her right lay a massive, round steel door of the kind used in bank vaults: presumably there to seal off the tunnel when closed, the door now lay open, flush with the wall. To Jasmine's left was a domed chamber. 

It looked like a shallow, upside-down bowl. It wasn't especially high - perhaps five metres at the dome's highest point - but it was very wide, something like thirty metres in diameter. The walls, the ceiling and some of the floor were constructed entirely of pinkish red brick. The bricks looked old: they were worn, bulged outward by subsidence in some places, blackened with mould in others. But the chamber also featured some incongruous-looking modern touches. On the other side of the chamber Jasmine saw another round steel door, also standing open. A ring of chrome-sided light globes were bolted onto the wall, together with what looked like PA speakers and several types of camera, all angled inward. 

In the centre of the room, taking up a good two-thirds of the floor space, was a wide circle of reinforced glass. Lauren walked out into the chamber until she was standing at the glass circle's edge. 

'This is what gave the theatre its name,' said Lauren's mouth. 'This is the pit where the Corporation held me prisoner for almost three hundred and fifty years. This is where they insulted my person, with fire and steel and... devices. But no more. Tonight I leave this place behind for good.' Lauren pointed past Jasmine. 'Press that button, please.' 

Jasmine turned, and found herself looking at a wall-mounted plastic box with a large red button in its centre. Her thumb pushed the button almost before she herself had seen it. 

'Now wait there,' said the voice behind her, over the rising whine of machinery. 

Jasmine did as she was told. She didn't have any choice. All she could do was stand there, looking at the wall, listening. 

For ten slow seconds the sound of the machine continued; to Jasmine, it felt longer. Then, with an echoing hiss, it fell silent. 

Jasmine waited. 

There was a sudden great rasp, as if something large, heavy and wet was being dragged across the floor. This was followed by a snort, then a low crooning sound that was somewhere between a wheeze and a moan. 

With no control over where her eyes went, Jasmine focused on her other senses. As well as the sewage smell she'd noticed earlier there was now a sudden extra noxious tang in the air - raw chicken, bad armpits, or some unholy mixture of the two. 

Raaaaasp - that sound again, then the same deep, wheezing, booming moan of effort. Both were louder this time, and Jasmine sensed a definite increase in the smell's potency. 

Jasmine knew what was happening: something was coming up behind her - something big. She did not enjoy waiting for whatever it was to come into view. If she'd had any choice in the matter, she would be running. But she couldn't even shiver. She had to stand there as the sounds got closer, powerless to do anything but wait and see whether the truth behind the sounds was as horrifying as what they did to her imagination. 

RAAAAASP. The smell was even stronger now - almost unbearable. The moan, when it came, was close enough for Jasmine to feel a warm exhalation on her back. 

'There,' said the voice, from what felt like just beside her ear. 'Now you may look on me.' 

When Jasmine turned, the first thing she saw was the all-too-familiar figure of Lauren. But there was something strange about her. Was Lauren... taller? She was looking down at Jasmine and grinning - a wild, cruel grin that showed all her teeth. Jasmine's eyes travelled downward, and that was when she noticed that Lauren was up off the ground. Her feet were dangling in the air, her legs swinging gently. 

Then Jasmine saw why. 

Oh. My. God. 

Jasmine's first impression was of a sort of hulking boulder shape, perhaps three metres across. But instead of rock, this thing was made of flesh. It was milky white in colour. Rings of grey muscle striped its rubbery sides. On the bit nearest to Jasmine was a primitive tube of a mouth from which projected a thick, dirty-grey, glistening tongue. The tongue had attached itself to Lauren's back somehow: it was this that was holding Lauren in the air. 

Lauren's eyes seemed to glow as they stared down at Jasmine. Her arms lifted from her sides. Her terrible grin widened. 

'Behold,' said her mouth, 'your Queen.'