Anyone passing through Canada Water Underground station at 11.15 p.m. that night might have been a little disturbed at the following events:
A train pulled up, heading north, its carriages disgorging a small number of people, most of whom, at this hour, were only here to change trains. Any of them, stepping onto the rising escalator, might have overheard the following conversation drift from the empty air:
“Don’t shove will you. Bloody hell…”
“This is interesting, isn’t it?”
“Excuse me, we need to keep moving. I can’t keep everyone invisible if we stand still; it’s all about walking speed.”
“Why walking speed?”
“Gotta blend in with the city, that’s what it’s about, see?”
“How do you know?”
“Well I’ve already been into the spirit realm with Ms Li, while we were being beaten up in Tooting.”
“There is no such thing as real invisibility! Merely tricks of the eye.”
“Thank you. Coming through…”
Maybe passers-by managed to ignore these noises, filing them away in that corner of the brain entitled, Don’t look, shan’t look, don’t want to know. There was, though, no denying the minor pile-up at the ticket barrier, as the gates opened and gates closed a half-dozen times around…
… nothing.
Vacancy.
Or rather, not vacancy, because there was something there: there were people, or not people, figures moving. But then there couldn’t be, there simply couldn’t be; and if there couldn’t be…
… it was all right, because there weren’t.
Such is the power of the rational mind.