not one voice but a babble of them coming from behind her. She turned to face the voices and the metro wind blew so hard she rocked on her feet.
Another train? She glanced back, but turned again because now she could hear a tremendous clattering as if a herd of cows or goats were being driven along the tunnel. But the cacophony resolved into the hoof beats of a single beast, with a loud accompaniment of echoes. Something appeared in the torch beam which could not be contained or encompassed by it. The only certainties were a massive whiteness and a black eye rolling in terror. The girl staggered back against the wall and something huge passed her so closely that she felt the roughness of its pelt on her cheek and the damp heat of its fear.
A horse, she told herself, hearing it gallop away towards the platform. Or maybe a bull, but bigger than any bull or horse she had ever seen. Impossibly big. How had it come down here?
The voices were louder and now she could make out shouting and laugher and grunts and cries and shrieks and even what seemed to be discordant snatches of song. Instinctively she switched off the torch and let them come, pressing herself to the wall. In the light of dull lanterns that barely lit their faces, let alone the way ahead, she saw men and women, ragged and degenerate and shambling, some so hirsute and hunched over that they looked like beasts. As they clamoured along the passage in a narrowing stream, she thought she saw the gypsy woman she had imagined earlier pass by, her mouth open in a soundless scream. Last of all came the saxophone man carrying a great loop of rope over one shoulder and only then did it occur to her that the motley crowd were a hunting party, and the white beast that had thundered by her their quarry.
When they had passed and the noise had faded, the girl flicked on her torch and shone it after them. Her heart leapt into her throat, for there, looming in its thin stream, was the wild tormented eye of the white beast. Somehow it had evaded the rabble and doubled back. It was trembling and she sensed it was about to plunge away from her into the darkness, perhaps onto the rails below.
‘Don’t,’ she said.
The beast shifted uneasily but stayed as she moved closer with the torch. Its thin beam illuminated an ear pricked forward and, fleetingly, something shining and sharp. She reached out with her free hand and laid it on the coarse white coat. Powerful muscles rippled under her palm as the beast gathered itself to leap away or perhaps trample her to death. Then all at once, it became still and the violence of its terror faded.
‘Come,’ the girl said, and it went with her. Now that she walked by its head, she could see it was definitely a horse, but its head was deformed. For the first time she wondered if it actually belonged to the metro denizens. It was no less a freak than they, for all its strange beauty. Perhaps she had been mistaken and they were not hunting it but trying to catch their pet. Hadn’t there been a tender yearning in the eyes of the saxophone man? Even so, why should the poor beast be kept in the blackness of the metro tunnels?
Her thoughts galloped ahead and she began to run lightly to keep up with them. The beast kept pace so beautifully that it was as if they merged into one animal. The sensation was unlike anything she had ever experienced. Waves of pleasure shuddered through her, and as they ran, her hand on its hot neck, she understood that this was the thing she had sought through all the dreams and all the tunnels, this running, the hot hide under the whorls of her fingertips.
When at last they reached the platform again, she forced herself to stop so that she could look for the arches with her torch. The beast nuzzled her neck tenderly, seeming to draw her smell in, and she shivered with pleasure at the intimate touch of its nostrils on her bare skin. Then she heard the distant clamour of the hunt, if hunt it was. Instinctively she turned to the beast and bade it run, but though it shivered, it would not go. Its eyes pleaded with her. She made herself push