by Greg James
John stopped running. He stopped dead on the pavement, blinking and licking at his dry lips. The slight mint of toothpaste lingered there, along with something else. What would Mum have called it? A presentiment?
He noticed grime coating the bus’s bodywork and the heavily scratched glass of its windows. It was still idling, waiting for him. The driver must’ve seen him in the side-mirror, though that was no guarantee he would wait. John shook his head firmly and took a step away from the kerb. In his peripheral vision, he saw movement inside the bus. When he turned to look, though, all was dark and still. The red concertina of the door closed with a hiss of pressure that sounded like a sigh, and John let out a sigh of his own. The bus moved off with a complaining shudder and a quiet petrol roar. He stood on the pavement, wondering. Why stop running? What had made him do that? A vagueness, a feeling, something in the air that he couldn’t place or name. Something passing strange.
Another bus would come along soon; he’d catch that one. John checked his watch and saw he was going to be late.
“Shit,” he muttered, turning to look back down the road and under the bridge crossing over it. There were cars and lorries coming along. No buses.
He began to slump towards the bus shelter for a sit-down when a flicker of movement caught his eye: something in the trees that separated the aged Victorian terrace of his street from the main road of the Broadway, some paleness clinging to the brittle fingers of the brambles. Not quite sure what was going on, John approached with slow, even steps and reached out to pull free a torn length of fine white rag. It looked like muslin, but it clung to his fingers like the threads of a spider’s web. It felt unnaturally moist. He tried to scrape it off then, on the very same brambles he’d freed it from, but his skin grew scratched lines as he tried to unpeel the stubborn whiteness.
Eventually, the material was reduced to little more than traces of angel hair decorating the brambles, clinging on despite everything. There had been something beautiful about it, John thought, and he felt some quiet form of loss at the sight of its bare remnants tangled and trailing in the air. Another bus hissed and stopped behind him. John boarded and let his thoughts trail away until he came to Burnt Wood station.
On the platform, he watched the tube train’s approach: a shaft of red, white, and black, slowing with a whine and a sigh that resolved into nothing. He boarded the train, as he had done for more mornings than he cared to count, or think on for too long.
He sat down and waited, watching other commuters climb aboard, all studiously avoiding each other – not touching, eyes averted, choosing not to see who was there. Those same eyes roamed over newspaper pages. The only sound was of fingers tapping and flicking at illuminated touch-screens. Feet shuffled about to make room as the carriage became more and more crowded. The doors whined closed and made a hard rubber thump as they met. John let his eyes close as well, just resting them. He wasn’t going to sleep.
The train moved off. Light receded, and shadows gathered in on all sides.
John Greyerson slept, and in the darkness he saw something white and torn rushing towards him and pulling away from him. Every hole and tear in its form was shaped like a scream – and he’d made every one of those wounds.
You did this to me.
John awoke. The train was pulling into Westminster station. He wiped his eyes, got to his feet, and stopped to let out a tired breath. It wasn’t a good idea to sleep on the tube. You lost track of time – and place. Time was precious, that’s what Mum always said. You can never have too much and you never know when it’s all going to run out.
He stepped out onto the platform and listened to the train leaving, its mournful cry receding into the distance.
“I’m sorry, Mum,” he said, before heading to the escalators.
Westminster station was much emptier than usual for the time of day. He wasn’t late by much, but surely the rush-hour crowd couldn’t have gone already. The pre-fabricated grey interior of the station was quieter than he could remember it being for a good long while. He took the escalator but didn’t hurry. He was late anyway. Five, ten, or twenty minutes – what did it matter? It was just another journey to and from a place he didn’t want to be. His life felt like a constant journey from one unwanted destination to the next, the sole variation being how long it took to reach one. So what was a few minutes here and there, in the end? It had been easier to live with when Mum was alive, but she was dead now. He was travelling alone.
The escalator came to a stop, and he stepped off, expecting to walk across the concourse, through the ticket barriers, down into the subway, and on towards the offices of the Engineering Institute where he worked, but he wasn’t where he should have been. Instead, this was another tube platform, deserted, with destination boards that were black and dead. The other side looked exactly the same: an overlit mirror of emptiness. It should never be this quiet during rush hour, he thought.
John paced along the platform, passing signs bearing the familiar red-and-blue cross-hatched emblem of the Underground. He could see a figure down the far end: a thin man dressed in a suit, with a briefcase at his feet and a bowler hat on his head.
“Hey!” he shouted.
The man didn’t respond. Silence ate the sound, allowing for no reassuring echo. He approached the man, who was standing still with his back turned.
“Excuse me,” John said.
“Yes?” said the man.
“Could you tell me how to get to the concourse? I appear to have lost myself in here.”
“Late again?”
John was startled by the man’s words; how could he know?
“Well, yes. In fact, I am.”
“Always running late. I don’t know why they don’t do something about it.”
Christ, did this man know him? Did he work at the Engineering Institute? He could do.
“Look, I’m sorry. Could you just tell me the way to get out?” John stammered.
“Typical. It’s just typical,” the man went on, “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. That’s all we ask. All we ask.”
“I know. Look, I said I’m sorry. I’ll ... I’ll try and improve, but now I just want to get into work.”
“Late again. Always late. What can you do, eh? What can you do?”
“Look, sir ... whoever you are, please ... ” John placed his hand on the man’s shoulder, but snatched it back as it came loose in his hand. The man took a step forward, stumbled, tottered, kicked his briefcase across the platform, and fell with a muffled sound before rolling over onto his back. Head and limbs spilled from within the suit, all as smooth and stiff as bone. The eyes were empty. The mouth and nose sculpted shapes. The hands and arms did not move. The mouth did not speak.
John nudged at the pieces of the man with his shoe and felt them ring hollow. Why had it been standing on the platform? Who’d dressed it and left it there? Where had the voice come from? Was this some kind of joke by students?
He retraced his footsteps, trying to keeping his breathing steady. No sense in losing my rag over this, he thought, as he took the escalator back to the lower level.
I made a wrong turn somewhere, that’s all. I’ll find my way out in a mo. I’m not running away from what I just saw. I’m not going to think about it, no.
On the lower level, a doorway led to steps; these would take him to the District and Circle line platform, and from there he’d reach the concourse. John climbed the steps, and climbed the steps, and climbed the steps. Lights flickered past him on each side, and he thought about what it would be like if they all went out at once. Then he tried to stop thinking about it.
Bad thoughts do no-one an ounce of good, Mum always said.
Someone was coming the other way, down the steps. John could hear footsteps approaching, step after step, steadily descending. His hand caught in something soft that was stuck to the polished metal rail; chewing gum, probably.
When he turned his hand over, white traces clung to the palm. He
brushed them away – they clung on – before glancing in the direction of the other person, the one who was coming down. The steps ended just above him, so it seemed. It could be the platform, or it could be the concourse, but those footsteps had been descending more steps than there were above, so it couldn’t be, could it?
His hand stinging from the strange threads, he flexed his fingers and made a fist. The footsteps stopped. John didn’t move. He waited for something to happen, for someone to tell him what to do.
Mum hadn’t told him what to do when things like this happened.
A figure in silhouette stood the top of the steps. John wanted to shout something at it, but couldn’t find the words, or the breath. The figure was not like the man on the platform; it was loose, like old clothes hanging over older skin. Holes in it formed torn and ragged shapes, like screams. It was leaning over him, seeming to bend further than it should have been able to. Pale as pale, it fluttered and moved, beating down at him with dead linen wings. He felt the light touch of it on his face; how soft, and how old it was.
John crossed his shaking hands before his face, stepping back, wanting to get away. He did not want it to touch him again. He heard a sound, felt nothing… and then he was falling. The tiled steps bit into his skull, gnawed at his spine. The world spun through violent shades of plastic, metal, and grey before it came to a stop. Pain climbed into his bones, made itself at home between the cracks in his breathing.
He remembered nothing more.
Chapter Two
As the sun came out from behind stray clouds, Daria Lee forgot the moment that had come before. A daydream, it’d felt like, of being somewhere dark and underground. It was gone now: an empty space, a lost moment, left behind before she’d even realised it was there. For a few more minutes, she wheedled at it with her thoughts, trying to remember, then she let it go and it became lost among other thoughts, moments passing as fast as the fields, fences, and swathes of land between the hills outside. They were there, and then they were gone, as the train moved along.
She thought about everything that’d led up to this point in her life: growing up in Merseyside; a first kiss flavoured with snakebite and cheap, sour tobacco; going to America; meeting a boy at summer camp; sex in the night; coming back home; the deep itch of her first tattoo; the scratch of a long splinter that pierced her foot as she danced her first fan-dance on stage. She’d joked afterwards, calling it her stigmata. It was all necessary in the end, a rite of passage. First kiss. First love. First tattoo. First blood. So many lost photographs of life and memory, dream and reality.
Daria was going to London to perform for the first time in years. More could come from this if it went well: offers, shoots, performances. She’d been away from performing for almost two years, a lifetime for an artist, and it felt, sometimes, as if it had been another life altogether.
“Excuse me, is this seat taken?”
She looked up to see a man standing there. The light through the window was falling across his face, making it hard to see his features clearly. There was only shape there, and a voice coming from it.
“Is this seat taken?” he asked again, in a stiff, dry voice.
“Nope, go on. Help yourself,” she said.
He coughed lightly and gestured with his head. She’d taken off her Doc Martens and put her feet up on the seat opposite. She put her feet down, but he sat on the next seat along anyway.
For fuck’s sake , she thought, and put her feet back where they’d been. She wasn’t doing him any harm. He gave them a glance, sighed a thin sound through his teeth, and then looked away. He was middle-aged and suited, with a briefcase resting on his lap. The skin on the back of his hands was loose, and she was sure she could see bones through it. She couldn’t see his eyes clearly because of the way the lowering sun caught the glass of the carriage window. She watched him pinch at the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger and breathe out through his mouth. His eyes appeared to stray for a moment, another casual glance at her feet. Daria thought about putting her boots on again. There was something about those eyes of his; the ones she couldn’t see.
Daria tried to return to the view outside, to feel the rhythm of the train running along the rails. Clouds were pulling over the sun, and a pall was falling over the fields. She watched the grey grass sway and bow, watched the man out of the corner of her eye and thought how unlike a person he seemed. He was old pieces of skin dressed in a suit. Daria had preferred it here when she’d been alone. There were others on the train, but no-one had sat on the seats around her.
She was sure the man in the suit was looking at her. The sun was hiding behind the clouds, but that still didn’t let her see his eyes. The thin shadow cast by the brim of his bowler hat was concealing them.
The train jolted hard around them, a flicker of shadow and movement. They’d passed through a tunnel.
“How far’re you going?” Daria asked.
He spoke through lips that seemed to abhor movement. “To London. I’m going all the way, are you?”
The way he said those last words made Daria look around for the emergency cord; she found it, but knew she couldn’t use it. What could she say to them if she did pull it? There was this man sitting with me. He was looking at me, even though I didn’t see him looking, and he said things to me, things I didn’t like, even though they meant nothing, not really
Nothing substantial there. Nothing she should worry about. That’s what most people would say. Where’s the harm in looking, or talking?
“I’m going to London too,” she said.
A barely perceptible nod, no more words.
This was a man made for nine to five, a creature culled from dirt, dead skin cells, and moisture found in the corners of overlit office silos. His world was a dry and empty one of agendas, meetings, deadlines, and collecting debt. When the lights in the office went out at five on the dot, she imagined his suit would collapse to the ground as he became dirt, dead skin cells, and moisture until the next morning.
The look in his eyes, still shadowed, was making her skin itch.
Daria shifted in her seat and looked back out of the window, tongue stirring her labret, all thoughts of conversation stillborn in the air. She observed in her periphery the tense, occasional gripping of his knuckles. His eyes could be looking at her right now, but she couldn’t tell for definite. His lips moved but didn’t speak. Did he have something to say but was trying very hard not to say it? No, he let out a thin breath and took in another. Daria looked up at the hanging red of the emergency cord running across the upper edge of the carriage window. The man in the suit made her uncomfortable. The train journey went on as one long, drawn-out moment. Sunlight scattered through breaking clouds as late afternoon worked its way through the deepening gallery of hues that led to early evening.
They sat together, and they breathed together, Daria and the man in the suit. Close enough to one another, but not touching. She did not look at him but remained sure he was looking at her. She could feel him on her skin, touching without fingers.
This long, stretched-out moment, she thought, it has to end. It’s got to. The journey to where they were going had to end so their lives could begin again when they went their separate ways. It was all under the surface, lost in the words, quietly kept from being understood. This would be over soon, but he was making it last as long as he could.
The air in the train became warm and tasteless as they neared London. She felt sleepy; around her, light escaped, seeming to evaporate a little at a time. Her eyelids fluttered, and she saw black butterfly wings beating slowly and silently over her surroundings. Flicker . The man in the suit moved a bit, between each faltering beat of sleep, a mannequin coming to unseemly life. Flicker . Shadows retreated as he reached across the seats with fingers made of sallow candle-bones. Flicker . Her socks were on. Flicker . Her socks were being carefully drawn off. Flicker . Those fingers of his, touching her bare feet. Flicker . Her feet were in his lap. Her toes were in
his mouth, where he treasured them until they were wet. His trousers were undone and something worm-white hung out. Flicker . A damp toughness pressing urgently against her arches, leaving her soles feeling moist and seeded from the dewy cum spun over them. Flicker . His eyes tight-shut. His expression, beatific misery. Flicker . The grip of hands on her ankles intensified. His liver-spotted abdomen was opening, puckering, folding in on itself, forming a glistening, lipless mouth her feet were slithering into. She felt something stir inside the mouth, touch her skin, something old, wet, and cold; it could have been a tongue.
Daria kicked and screamed. Shadows retreated all at once. A silence fell suddenly in the carriage. Frowning faces rose and fell. She was awake, and he was gone. There was no man in a suit, no trace of him, nothing. He’d never been there. Had he? There was no sign or sound of someone hurrying away along the carriage. He’d be hard to miss. Could he have been another daydream? He could’ve been. She caught her breath and wiped at her eyes. Was she becoming unstuck after months of holding herself together, like old pieces of skin, barely bound? The world outside held no answers for her, only disused farmhouses, mudflats, and ragged trees. Everything was okay – except for the dark, moist patch on the seat where he’d been sitting.
