People Park by Pasha Malla Page B

pantlegs. At night anything could happen here, and often it did: instead of a place of stories, it became a place where stories happened to you.
    Following Calum up F toward Whitehall, Debbie talked unceasingly, if only to distract from their footfalls, calling out to be chased.
    So you’re really in with these folks now, huh?
    Sure.
    They’re okay?
    They’re okay.
    You’re not worried about —
    Calum clicked his tongue. There’s nothing to worry about. You have this idea that these people are like, not people. Maybe they just figured out something different than you. Maybe they look at what you think’s a normal life and are just like, that’s not for me. Maybe it’s too safe and boring and there’s nothing, there’s no edge to it. So they make something else. And maybe their something else isn’t for you.
    Well why take me there then?
    So you can see.
    Does this mean you’ve been before? You’ve hung out with them lots? Calum?
    He quickened his pace.
    At F Street and Tangent 20 the Yellowline sloped downward and continued at streetlevel into the Whitehall Barns, and it was here that Calum veered inland. He led Debbie down a laneway between empty warehouses, through the hole in the chainlink, to the silos. In there? she said, and he told her, Yep — though he seemed to waver, and it was Debbie who went first.
    Inside, the moon sliced through the shattered windows and played jagged patterns over the concrete floor. Flashlight, said Calum. Debbie turned it on: a dab of yellow quivered at their feet, down a flight of slatted metal stairs to the basement, where bunches of candles burned on either side of a door propped open with a chair.
    Then they were in the service tunnels angling down beneath Whitehall, the temperature warmed, Debbie shed her coat and sweater, carried them heaped in her arms. An industrial noise came grinding up the tunnel. As they descended it intensified, a grating drone that set Debbie’s teeth on edge. On and on they went, deeper and deeper underground. Finally the tunnel released them into a sort of grotto, where the sound exploded: a terrible music that was huge and cruel and everywhere.
    Debbie killed the flashlight. Motes of colour swam before her eyes, she plugged her ears and blinked at the sparkling dark. Gradually she was able to pick out industrial lamps strung along extension cords ringing the room. Beyond their alcoves of weak light the room was a fathomless smudge. Slowly the shadows took shape, they seemed to swell and pulse and writhe — people.
    Were they dancing to this tuneless music that rattled Debbie’s bones inside her skin? There were people around the periphery too. In one of the nearby light nooks a hooded figure held out a forearm to someone else dragging a piece of glass across the skin: the blood swelled in black bubbles, wiped away with a rag. They noticed Debbie watching, turned toward her, faces just shadows inside their hoods.
    Where was Calum, he was gone. Debbie squinted. How many people were there? Thirty, forty, hundreds, she couldn’t tell. And even with her ears plugged the music throbbed inside her head. Though this was hardly music, no instruments, no one was singing. It was noise, yet somehow immediate and intimate, even alive. It seemed, thought Debbie, to billow mistlike from the room itself and swirling to consume everyone within.
    Tentatively she took her fingers out of her ears, let the sound come screaming in, tried to make sense of it. The whining through the middle range was reminiscent of the staticky screech of a distorted guitar, the pulse beneath it seemed percussive, but there was no sign of either guitars or drums. Just people, ringed by a dozen or so megalithic towers of speakers and amps, wires webbed overtop in a ropy ceiling. Inside these towers the crowd milled and shifted — slow, almost purposeful.
    Calum stood at the edge of the cipher, backlit, talking to a girl wearing what appeared to be a glove for a hat.
    Debbie caught