young Cadge has
preempted me."
"Sorry, Harry," Cadge said.
"Don't apologize, lad. It's good to be worried about the Hour of Screams. Good to be scared. It's
something not to be trusted."
Jazz thought of her mother's advice on trust, and how precious it was, and how easily it was given
out nowadays. I trust Cadge, she thought. And the idea gave her great com-fort.
As they shone their torches ahead and Harry began to talk, Jazz reached out and held the boy's
hand.
"It's something we've learned to live with," Harry said, "though no one was meant to live with it. I
would've told you about it earlier but, truth be told, it's been months since we've had the Hour of Screams
come through. I should've warned you sooner, Jazz. I've been meaning to. Just didn't want to scare you
off."
"But what is it?"
"It's a dead thing, the Hour. An old, dead thing." "I don't understand," Jazz said. "Is this about the...
echoes?"
Harry frowned, shot a glance at Cadge, and then refocused on Jazz. "You hear them too, do you, or
has Cadge just been speaking out of school ?"
"I hear them," she said, thinking how strange it was to be speaking so normally about something she
would have thought impossible not long ago. But her perception of the possible and the impossible had
changed radically of late. "Sometimes I see things too."
He studied her. "What things?"
"Like silhouettes. Just flickers, really," she lied, though she wasn't sure why she withheld the truth. It
felt personal to her. Intimate. "I thought they were ghosts."
"Perhaps they are. But either way, they're old things, whispering down here the way the beams and
boards in an old house will creak when the wind blows. Nothing to con-cern yourself with."
Jazz hesitated a moment, then forged ahead. "You've seen them too?"
"A glimpse now and again," Harry admitted, still watch-ing her curiously. Then the moment passed
and he waved a hand as though to erase the conversation. "Nothing to worry about, though. I don't talk
about the echoes with the others. They've enough superstition among them already. But everyone knows
what I'll be telling you now, Jazz girl.
It's the Hour you've got to be careful of. Just because things have been quiet down here doesn't
mean they'll stay quiet."
Cadge led the way through the twisted steel door and into a huge circular tunnel, which had been
ground into the rock and unlined. There were not even any supports built here for line and platform. It was
unfinished rather than abandoned; this place had never formed a true part of the Tube. Perhaps a plan had
been drawn wrong, or money had run out, but this was a route that led nowhere. There was graffiti on one
wall, but it had faded with time, washed away by a continuous trickle of water penetrating the tunnel at its
highest point and following the curve.
"We call it the Hour of Screams," Harry said. "Though it doesn't last an hour, and sometimes it's
more a long sigh than a scream. It echoes through the Underground —at least, through all those places
hidden away, where people aren't supposed to be or even know about. Or where there are people like us.
Because in a way, I suppose some of us are as lost as the spirits that make the scream."
"Spirits?" Jazz asked. "But you said you didn't think —"
"It's old London that cries out, young Jazz. You know the saying, If a tree falls in a forest and
there's nobody there to hear it, does it make any noise at all? The Hour of Screams is a bit like that
falling tree. It happens whether there's anyone to hear it or not, because it's just a part of how things must
be. Trees grow, age, and die, and then they fall. So it is with history. History's all about rise and fall, you
know that, girl?"
Jazz did not respond, because she thought it was a ques-tion that did not call for an answer.
"Everyone knows about the Hour of Screams," Cadge said from ahead, as if anticipating her
thoughts.
"True," Harry said. "But not everyone knows not to lis-ten. To hear it is... painful. Perhaps damaging.
I've seen people driven mad, and some of them never get better, Jazz. It touches them and leaves
something of itself in them; liv-ing people shouldn't bear the burdens of the dead. When I first came down
here —before the United Kingdom came together, when I was on my own—the Hour screamed through
one day. The lady I'd hooked up with for a while, Kathryn, she refused to cover her ears, refused to sing
her song. Said she was proud. Well, proud she may have been, but
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