Alfie went home that evening and told his parents that his meeting had gone well. He had seen that what the provost of the university was offering was very much real. He told them that he had decided to accept the place and would be catching a midday train. Their responses and reactions were warm and congratulatory, including beaming smiles, long hugs, and gruff words of well done from his dad.

When they asked him what it was he was studying or what the university specialized in, Alfie indulged in only a moment’s hesitation before answering with something that was not precisely a lie nor precisely the truth.

“It’s like a government-run initiative, I think,” he said, the Grand Prism, who apparently had a hand in the mundane government, popping into his head. “And so far as it goes, they have a pretty eclectic curriculum.”

“Why’d they choose you?” Steve asked, cracking a can of lager, taking a sip, and closing his eyes in ecstasy for a moment.

Alfie gave him a look. His dad swallowed hurriedly.

“I didn’t mean it like that, lad. Didn’t mean why did they choose you? I know why they would’ve chosen you: your inherited manly good looks.” Alfie’s mother slapped her husband’s arm, and he chuckled. “I just meant, it’s not like you applied, is it?”

Alfie laughed at his father making a show of rubbing his beefy arm and scowling at his mom.

“I guess it was just luck,” he said. “Right place at the right time sort of thing.”

His mother waggled the takeaway menu she had just pulled off the front of the fridge.

“You know what it is, love?” she said. “It’s that manifesting your destiny lark.”

Alfie and his dad exchanged glances.

“Sure it is, Mom,” Alfie said.

“You mark my words. I know you think I’m silly, but just think about it.”

“I’ve thought about this a lot, Mom, trust me,” Alfie said earnestly, giving his mother a kiss on the cheek and slipping into a chair at the kitchen table. “You know, if I had anyone to thank for this indirectly, it would probably be Uncle Vali. It was at a shop I was visiting for him that I bumped into Provost Sharpe.”

“Maybe, maybe,” his mother said, clearly unwilling to concede the point, especially to Uncle Vali, whom she regarded as a good-hearted man with trouble following him like a lingering, noxious fart. “That might be so, but what I’m saying, dear, is that right when you were wandering about aimlessly, not knowing where you were going or what you doing, this opportunity fell into your lap.”

“It’s fate!” Alfie’s dad said in a hushed voice, plonking himself down in the seat opposite his son and waggling his fingers around in a mystical manner.

“Ah, you boys!” Linda said, throwing up her hands. “You’ve no romance in your souls! I’m telling you, self-expansion, both near and far, is the order of the day. Now, what are you hard-headed realists getting from the Bekash? Steve, you’ll be having the Bombay aloo for a side?”

“You know me too well, love,” Steve said, leaning back so that his chair creaked.

“More than I’d like sometimes,” Alfie’s mother replied.

To celebrate, as was Turner family tradition on such occasions, they ordered Indian takeaway. The meal was pleasant and filled with laughter and good-natured teasing. Alfie’s father busted out a couple of fresh jokes that he had doubtless been told by one of the younger apprentices at his work. One of these was so crude that it caused Alfie’s mother to spray poppadom crumbs across the table, while Alfie almost dropped an onion bhaji into his lap.

If either of his parents noticed it—his father may or may not have, but with his mom, there was no chance she hadn’t—neither of them mentioned the scabbed-over cut above Alfie’s eyebrow.

The following morning, the goodbyes were about as brief and pragmatic as Alfie had thought they’d be.

“I’m not going away forever,” Alfie said after his mother had come in for a fourth hug as he stood on the doorstep.

“Where is this university, love?” his mom asked. “Perhaps I can send you some home baking or—”

“Mom, you’re a fantastic woman and a hell of a linguist, but you’re no Mary Berry. Remember that time you put cayenne instead of cinnamon into that batch of cookies?”

“I thought we were going to lose your father that day,” his mother said.

Alfie laughed.

“That taught him a lesson about shoveling biscuits in like a pig, though, didn’t it?” Linda said sweetly.

“I’m going to be fine, Mom,” Alfie assured her. “I’ll drop you a text when I get there.”

“And where is ‘there’?”

Alfie grinned. “I don’t know precisely. Somewhere south of the city, I think.”

“Nothing’s changed there, then,” his father quipped breathlessly from the top of the stairs.

“Our instructions are to get on the train. That’s it,” Alfie said.

“Alfie—”

“I’ll be fine, Mom,” he assured her. “I think the vagueness of it is all part of some initial test.”

“Ah, yeah, I think I watched a show about this sort of lark on the telly, love,” Steve Turner said slowly, as he took the conversation as an opportunity for a breather. “There’s a lot of this new-age educational bollo—I mean, thinking going on these days. It’s like those nursery schools where the kids are allowed to start fires and cook and stuff like that. Or snowfla—the new generation, I should say—only having to do a four-day work week. Or kids making millions of pounds sitting on their backsides and playing computer games. I think this is meant to engage young people more, love.”

Alfie’s mother didn’t look convinced. Alfie didn’t blame her. She had been part of the education system herself when she had been working.

“Mom, I will be okay,” Alfie repeated. “I’m an adult. I can come back whenever I want. It’s not like they’re going to tell me I can’t and send me to the naughty corner.”

“Cor, you’d be lucky to find a single bloody educational institution in this soft land that’s still allowed to do something like a naughty corner, mate,” Alfie’s dad lamented. “You lot are such wimps.”

Alfie’s mother reached out and pulled Alfie to her. She gave him one last kiss on the cheek and then patted his face.

“Just stay out of trouble, love,” she said. “And do your best at whatever it is you decide to do.”

Alfie grinned and squeezed her hand.

“You know me and trouble, Mom,” he said. “We go together about as well as socks and Crocs.”

And then Alfie was walking down the garden path and giving one final wave to his folks.

All in all, Alfie thought, the momentousness of the occasion had only been slightly marred by the fact that he hadn’t been able to tell his parents precisely what he would be doing at this institution… and by the fact that his dad had already been manhandling his mattress down the stairs when he left.

* * *

Located in Mayfair, between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park stations, Down Street tube station had a short life as a working station from 1907 to 1932. However, it was repurposed and became famous in certain circles as a critical facet in winning the Second World War, when it covertly transformed into the Railway Executive Committee’s bomb-proof headquarters. This meant that it was essentially turned into a bunker for Churchill while the Cabinet War Rooms were being prepared. Since then, it had barely been altered.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Alfie had walked past Down Street plenty of times. Like so many quietly interesting things that dotted England’s capital city though, it had been a while since he had actually seen it.

The building, with its red brick and three distinctive semi-circular windows, looked as abandoned as always when he arrived. Part of it had been turned into a corner shop. Alfie, not knowing when he was next going to eat, ducked into the shop and bought himself a sandwich and a couple of muesli bars.

When he emerged, pocketing his change, he found Will Savage waiting for him. He was dressed as he had been the previous day: jacket, torn jeans, and scuffed-up sneakers. There were dark smudges under his eyes and a faint bruise on his pale jaw where Barney had nutted him. Alfie wondered if what the thug had said before he’d scared him off had been true. Did Will not have a home? Was he sleeping rough?

“Stocking up with provisions, are you?” Will said, stopping to examine his fingernails so that he could shoot Alfie a grin. “Very wise. Dunno how long this wyrm is going to take to get out to the High Weald.”

“The High Weald?” Alfie repeated. “That’s where—”

“—the Aetherbright Academy is, yeah,” Will finished.

Alfie nodded. The High Weald was an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty located in Southeast England. It stretched across parts of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey and was characterized by rolling hills, dense forests, and picturesque countryside. It was two hours at the most by train from London.

Well, at least I know where I’m going, he thought.

He was just about to text his mom with this piece of information when a groan from Will made him look up.

“You all right?” Alfie asked, pulling out a cheese and ham sandwich and taking a bite.

“Yeah. Fine,” Will replied.

“Barney didn’t catch up with you again, did he?”

Will laughed mirthlessly. “Nah, he’d be too busy trying to de-flatten his nose, I reckon. Nah, just had a bit of a sleepless night, that’s all. I don’t want to carry on about it.”

Alfie caught Will eyeing the sandwich in his hand. He held out the container holding the other half.

“Have that,” he said. “I’m not much of a one for ham, but that’s all they had.”

Will smiled gratefully.

“Right,” Alfie said thickly, stuffing the rest of his sandwich into his mouth, “how about we go in and catch this train? You got your Matriculation Key?”

Will made an indistinct noise through his mouthful of sandwich and started to pat himself down with his free hand.

“Never mind, I’ve got mine,” Alfie said.

He reached into the neck of his shirt and pulled out his own ornate little brass key on its chain.

“Now, where to put you, where to…?” he muttered.

The key shot straight out, still tethered on its chain, then angled slightly downward.

Alfie looked around to make sure that no pedestrians had seen his impromptu impression of Dynamo the magician, then stepped toward the closed door. It looked like it hadn’t been opened in ages. It was covered in a skin of old flyers, graffiti, and chewing gum. When Alfie was only a few inches from the door, the key slapped itself against an innocuous bill advertising a theatrical play titled Excelsior, Prince of Magicians. There was a very brief glow.

The door opened soundlessly.

Alfie looked surreptitiously over his shoulder. Not a single passerby had stopped. They carried on, heads bent, each intent on whatever private business lay before them.

Motioning to Will, Alfie stepped inside. Will followed. The door closed noiselessly behind them.

Down Street Station was, to Alfie’s semi-disappointed astonishment, surprisingly humdrum. If you took away the fact that it shouldn’t have been there at all, shouldn’t have had rails or existed, it was just a tube station like any other than Alfie had ever seen. It was, if anything, grubbier than any other station he had been in, what with it supposedly being abandoned.

Inside, the walls were blackened with the years like silver long-neglected. The concrete was cracking, paint flaking, and the whole place was lit by levitating globes that emitted a dim orange light, which guided without really illuminating anything.

Alfie’s key tugged at the chain around his neck, even though he had tucked it back under his shirt. He followed it around a few twists and turns, his footfalls barely making any sound on the ground, which was encrusted with the dirt of ages.

The key led him to a skinny, caged, old-school elevator shaft. Alfie pulled the key free once more and pressed it to a panel where one might usually expect the control buttons to be found.

Following its closure to the public in the 1930s, the lifts had been removed and the shaft turned into a ventilation facility. When Winston Churchill took over, the government needed to put in a new lift for the staff working there. Fortunately, with the old lift shaft being used for air supply, the center of the emergency staircase, which was usually used for ventilation, had been reused for a small lift.

Alfie and Will climbed into the rickety-looking antique elevator. Distantly, Alfie thought he heard the sound of the street noise rise as if the door to Down Street had been opened.

More possible passengers, he thought.

The doors shut with a clang. Without either he or Will moving a muscle, the elevator lurched and dropped silently into the bowels of the earth.

When they emerged into the warm dimness of the platform, it was to find a space that was familiar to both of them. There were a whole bunch of young men and women standing about waiting for the train, maybe a hundred. To Alfie’s practiced eye, which still had a schoolboy’s discernment when it came to judging who belonged and who didn’t, who was at ease and who wasn’t, there must have been about fifteen or twenty other young people who looked as out of their depth as he felt.

Most of the assembly, either older students or people traveling on business of their own, were chatting away loudly or wore their headphones and were staring into space. Some of the more nervous and self-conscious looking people, who Alfie thought must be first years like him, were in small groups, and others were standing on their own—swinging their arms, staring at the ceiling, kicking at nothing, and all the other things that humans do when they’re waiting for something and go into pause mode.

“What?” Will asked when he saw the look on Alfie’s face.

Alfie didn’t say anything. He just stared into the abyssal eye of the tunnel mouth at the end of the platform. It looked far, far larger than a tunnel for a train usually was.

“Let me take a stab at it,” Will said. “You were hoping for something over the top. Welcome to reality, mate.” He grinned and shook his head. “Sometimes a train is just a train. And sometimes it’s a wyrm.”

“Huh?” Alfie finally caught on, realizing that what they might, in fact, be boarding was a giant worm. He shook his head. Nah, that wasn’t possible… was it?

“Ohhh…” Alfie let out as their transport finally came into view. “A wyrm.”

And a wyrm it was.

It might have been alive once, but it was now certainly dead. Or, at least, it seemed dead. It undulated into the station, scales and all. The creature was much like Alfie imagined a dragon would be, but this one had no wings and was much more serpentine in appearance.

It was a testament to the last few days that Alfie didn’t question how a creature like this could exist, let alone in London. He simply took it as a given. And due to this, his mind now whirled with the possibilities of what the future might have in store for him.

At first, he wondered where exactly the passengers were meant to go, since there was no compartment at the top of the gigantic beast.

As the foremost sections of the wyrm flashed by, Alfie saw holes in the creature’s side, like windows, and through those holes he could glimpse passengers. Sections of the creature were segmented and painted with different signs, and he guessed that each section must have represented a carriage on an ordinary train.

“Students aren’t the only ones catching this thing?” he asked Will, over the rush of displaced air.

“Nah, there are a few stops before ours, I hear.”

Alfie stared with his mouth open. As the wyrm slowed, he was able to have a better look at the carriages and see who was riding inside. The first one that snared his attention was a carriage with heavily tinted windows. The outside had been painted upside down, and there didn’t appear to be any seating inside. The reason for this became quickly apparent.

“Yeah, vampires aren’t much for seats, unless required by social convention, of course,” Will said, barely glancing at the carriage as it went by. “Who wants a chair smacking them in the kisser while they’re hanging upside down from the bars, aye?”

Alfie didn’t answer. Another segment carriage had gone past. This one was filled with water.

“What—who—are they?” he asked, tugging at Will’s sleeve and indicating the tall, gray-skinned figures floating in the water-filled carriage. These creatures’ faces and upper bodies looked like men and women, though they were without hair on their heads and had uniformly black eyes. They also had shark-like tails and looked to breathe underwater through gills behind their ears.

“Adaro,” Will said. He had started fidgeting from foot to foot as if he couldn’t wait to get on the wyrm. “According to legend, the adaro would wait for sailors and fishermen to fall into the water, yeah. If someone had been a particularly rascally and sinful boy or girl, the adaro would suck out all the good parts of their personality, only leaving behind the darkest side of humanity.”

The wyrm had slowed to a crawl.

“Is that true?” Alfie asked.

Will snorted. “Don’t be a wally, mate. That’s just a rumor the adaro started. They wanted human sailors to leave them alone and stop asking them to dive for sunken treasure and all that sort of stuff.”

“You make legends sound like PR stunts.” Alfie laughed.

“They probably were sometimes. I mean, when Christianity started being the next hot thing in organized religion, the adaro in the Solomon Islands transformed their usual legend to fit in with the Bible—keeping up with the times, see? They started putting it around and saying that they were really fallen angels or demons.”

Alfie’s amazement bucket was already overflowing obviously, but the sight of the mermaids and adaro just sitting around and floating in the water, looking bored like any other commuters might, was just nuts.

The fact that this wyrm-cum-train was not just for Aetherbright Academy students was made all the clearer when the conductor got off the train, blew a whistle, and made his announcement in a voice that shook the dust from the ceiling.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Down Street Station! Another reminder that any prospective Aetherbright Academy students should please ensconce themselves in the farthest rearward carriage, thank you very much!”

“C’mon,” Will said, slapping Alfie on the shoulder.

As the pair of young men walked toward the back of the wyrm, the conductor, looking resplendent in a deep plum uniform, made his final announcement.

“The Aetherbright Academy will be the last stop on the Wyrmline for today and today only, ladies and gents!” the conductor cried. “Before that, we will be stopping at Tranquility, Elflock Terminal, Eagle Heights, Eagle Lows, The Inbetweeny, Epiphany Station, and Egad-Blithering. Thank you, and enjoy the ride!”