The Wrong Train

by Jeremy de Quidt

  It was still just about light.

  She knew the road the house was on well enough—it had been on her paper route when she used to do one—but she didn’t know the actual house at all. As she remembered it, there wasn’t one at the bottom of the road where the directions said there was—at least not one she’d ever seen. The road just ended in a thick, high hedge, and nothing had been built there since. So she went down the road with the paper from the pad, thinking that the directions her mom had written down had to be wrong. But when she got to the bottom of the road, she saw that they weren’t.

  There was a gap in the hedge and a rutted path behind it just like the directions said there would be. She’d never noticed the gap or the path before, but you can do that. Even in a place you think you know really well, there’ll be something you won’t see unless you look for it. Sophie stood for a moment wondering why she’d never noticed it before. The path disappeared between overgrown clumps of shrubs and bushes. But she couldn’t see the house.

  It had been raining in the day, and the ruts in the path were filled with water. She picked her way between them. The path wound through the wet shrubs and bushes, and it wasn’t long before she couldn’t see the road anymore, but she couldn’t see the house either, and she was just beginning to wonder whether she’d gotten this right or whether she should go back and try another way when the garden opened out in front of her and she came to an uncut, tussocky lawn. There was an old stone fishpond with a sundial and behind that, the house. It was what the real estate agents in the town would have described as “a large Victorian villa in need of renovation.” It looked cold and uncared for, an ugly slab of a place with shutters on the windows and large panes of black glass. There were steps up to a painted front door with a fanlight above it and a brass loop on the wall that rang a bell, which Sophie faintly heard answer from inside when she pulled on it.

  She took a step back and waited.

  For a while nothing happened. She was about to pull the loop again when she heard children’s voices approaching the door on the other side, and something wooden being dragged along a hard floor. She could hear the voices bickering about whose turn it was to open the door. There seemed to be two of them.

  She put her mouth to the door.

  “Could you get your mom?” she said. “Tell her it’s Sophie. I’m the babysitter.”

  There was a pause, then more scraping and bumping, and the door opened on a chain. The gap was wide enough for Sophie to see a brown-haired girl. The girl was standing on a chair so that she could reach the door lock, and a brown-haired boy was peering from behind her. Sophie eyed them up, quickly trying to gauge just how much trouble they were likely to be. They must have both been about seven. The girl was wearing a faded Minnie Mouse T-shirt and the boy a blue camouflage one with “Captain America” written across it.

  “Could you get your mom or your dad?” she said.

  The girl and the boy glanced at each other. Then the girl undid the chain, climbed down off the chair, and moved it to one side so that she could open the door wider.

  “They’ve already left,” she said. “But we knew someone would be coming.”

  She had a prim voice—private school, thought Sophie—but for all that it sounded resigned and disappointed, as though being left alone wasn’t something new, and Sophie felt sorry for her. The girl reached out—her hand was soft and warm—and taking hold of Sophie, she drew her firmly in through the door. The boy closed it behind them, then he pushed past Sophie and, running overexcitedly down the hall, did a slide on the hard, polished floor in his blue-socked feet. Then he ran back and did the same thing the other way.

  Little show-off, thought Sophie.

  “Did they leave me a note or a number I can call?” she asked.

  The girl and the boy glanced at each other again.

  “I don’t think so,” said the girl.

  Sophie ran the answer quickly through her head—there had to be a note somewhere. Probably in the kitchen; she’d find it later, but it wasn’t a good start.

  “I’m Sophie,” she said, dropping her bag onto the floor.

  “I’m Lucy,” said the girl.

  “And we’re Tom,” said the boy.

  There was something annoyingly babyish about the way he said it. As though no one had ever bothered correcting him, and he hadn’t quite understood yet that there was only one of him.

  He did another slide on the polished floor.

  “Well,” said Sophie. “What we’ll do is look for a note, and if we can’t find one we’ll sort out when bedtime is and then work back from there.”

  That’s what she normally did, and it usually worked, but the girl had already seemingly lost interest in her. She’d wandered off into one of the other downstairs rooms.

  Sophie followed her.

  It was a large, high-ceilinged room with a worn green tartan carpet on the floor. There were big armchairs and sofas too—and they were worn and threadbare as well—and a sideboard and table, both polished and dark and heavy. It was a cold room—untidy, as though no one ever bothered to put things back after they’d used them. There were empty boxes of games on the floor with the contents tipped out and strewn around. In one corner was a flat-screen television, larger than at Sophie’s house. It was the kind that costs a lot of money.

  The girl flopped down on the sofa and pointed the remote at the flat screen; it came to life in a hiss of untuned static.

  “What time do you go to bed?” said Sophie.

  The girl didn’t answer. She didn’t even look at Sophie. The boy came in and flopped facedown onto the cushions beside his sister. He wriggled over onto his back and, resting his head in her lap, lay looking at the fizzing white screen—his blue-socked feet dangling over the armrest.

  “Well, I’ll go and see if I can find a note,” said Sophie.

  It was going to be a long evening.

  Outside, the light had almost faded.

  She found the kitchen. It was wide and long—a mixture of expensive new and shabby old. But there was no note that she could see, not on any of the counters or stuck to the fridge. She began to wonder if there was something her mom had missed telling her, some instruction she hadn’t written down. Her mom didn’t like Sophie to call her at work, but she’d just have to put up with it this time. Sophie went back into the hall, fished her phone out of her bag, and dialed her mom. It took her a few tries before she realized there was no signal.

  Sophie went back into the high-ceilinged room. The girl and the boy were still lying on the sofa watching the static-filled screen. They hadn’t even bothered to find a station.

  “Is there anywhere … ”

  She couldn’t think over the sound of the static, and it struck her as rude of them to not even look at her—so she bent down, picked the remote up from the sofa, and turned the screen off.

  They both looked up.

  “We were watching that,” they protested.

  She didn’t pay them any notice.

  “Is there anywhere here I can get a signal?” she said.

  The girl and the boy glanced at each other.

  “You have to go upstairs,” said the girl, “and hold the phone out of the top window, or go onto the roof.”

  “Have you got a landline?”

  They looked at each other again.

  It was a rather annoying habit.

  “No,” said the girl.

  She reached up to take the remote out of Sophie’s hand, but Sophie moved it away.

  The girl frowned, and then her face brightened.

  “If we let you turn the TV off,” she said. “Will you play with us?”

  Sophie looked down at the emptied and broken boxes of games strewn around the carpet.

  “All right, then,” she said. “And while we’re playing, we’ll sort out what we’re going to do next.”

  The boy scrambled off the sofa, his face suddenly eager and interested.

  “She’s going to play
with us!”

  Sophie began picking up boxes, trying to find one that was vaguely complete.

  “No, not them,” said the boy, and he took the box out of her hand. “We like playing chase. We chase—”

  “And I catch,” said the girl.

  The girl turned and, giggling, began running around the room, the boy chasing after her. They clambered over the backs of the sofas and jumped down onto the cushions, then scrambled behind the chairs, pushing them over, and when they bumped into each other they’d flap at each other with their hands, then chase again, the circles getting smaller and faster—chair, sofa, cushions. At first it seemed just a bit babyish and stupid, but the more it went on the more disturbing it got.

  “I think that’s enough now,” said Sophie.

  But they didn’t pay her any attention, they just got wilder—the boy hot and red-faced, kicking at the girl with his socked feet to keep her off him, and the girl breathless and pale, pulling him to the ground. He tried to crawl away from her but she dragged him back by his leg and sat heavily on his chest, pinning his wrists to the floor and putting her mouth against his face as though she was going to bite it. Sophie didn’t know if it was a pretend fight or a real one anymore. Then, damp and breathless, the girl let go of the boy’s wrists and sat back. She brushed her tangled hair out of her face, and let him push her off him. They lay panting against each other on the floor among the broken boxes of games, looking up at Sophie.

  Still lying on her back, the girl said suddenly, “What’s your party trick?” The question caught Sophie by surprise but the girl didn’t give her time to answer. “Do you want to see mine?” she said. “I can open my mouth really wide.”

  She opened her mouth.

  Sophie could see the white of her teeth, but it wasn’t that wide at all.

  Not to be outdone, the boy sat up. “And we can open our eye really wide,” he said.

  He put his finger to the skin below one eye and pulled it down a bit, revealing a little line of red inside the lid.

  “That’s gross,” said Sophie.

  He seemed pleased with the result.

  “You shouldn’t do that, though. You’ll make your eye sore.”

  She didn’t feel like playing a game anymore and wondered what she was going to do with them.

  She didn’t like them at all. Didn’t like this house.

  Maybe food was the answer.

  “Have you eaten yet?” she said.

  They shook their heads.

  “Then come and show me what there is in the kitchen.”

  They looked at each other again, but neither of them moved.

  Sophie took a breath that was more an audible exercise of patience than anything else, and went back across the hall to the kitchen. She had to turn the light on now. She opened the first two cupboards she came to, but they were just plates and bowls. They must have been ones the family didn’t use anymore, because they were dusty and grubby, like they’d been put away and left.

  She closed the doors and opened the fridge, and even as it opened she caught the smell.

  The fridge was full of food—plates and saucers covered in plastic film, fruit and meat still in its packaging—but how long it had all been there, there was no saying. All of it was rotten and moldy.

  It stank.

  There were dead flies in a pool of water that had collected in the mush on the glass top of the crisper.

  She slammed the door and stepped back.

  “You can look upstairs too,” said the girl.

  Sophie turned around.

  The girl and the boy had come quietly from the other room and were watching her from the open kitchen door. The boy ran back into the hall and did a slide on the floor.

  “Other people who come usually look upstairs,” the girl said.

  Behind her, the boy pressed the switch on the wall, and the lights in the hall came on.

  But Sophie was thinking about the fridge. It hadn’t been emptied for ages—you couldn’t live with a fridge like that.

  She looked at the girl.

  “Where have your mom and dad gone?” she said.

  The girl didn’t answer; she just stood there in her faded Minnie Mouse T-shirt.

  “Look,” she said. “I can open my mouth really wide.”

  She opened it again for Sophie.

  She managed a little bit more this time than she had before, but it still wasn’t really anything to make a fuss about.

  “Yeah, you’ve shown me,” said Sophie.

  The boy slid up on his socks beside the girl and pulled down his eyelid, but Sophie wasn’t really in the mood for this anymore. She was thinking about the fridge, and thinking that it might be better if she picked up her bag and went now.

  But the girl and the boy just stood in the door.

  “I can do it much more than that,” insisted the girl, as though realizing that Sophie hadn’t been impressed with what she’d done. “I can open it really wide.”

  This time when she opened her mouth, she did it like she was yawning at the same time, and there was no mistaking that she could open her mouth really wide—Sophie could see her teeth and her tongue.

  “Yeah, that’s really quite wide,” said Sophie.

  But now she just wanted to get her bag and go. She’d call her mom when she got to the road—there’d be a signal there—and she’d tell her that there’d been no note and it was a really creepy house, and she wasn’t going to do that one again.

  The girl glanced at the boy, and they nodded at each other and smiled.

  Then the girl looked at Sophie again.

  “No,” she said. “I can do it much wider than that.”

  And there was something very horrible—spiteful, almost like a purr—in the way she said it.

  She hunched her shoulders up to her ears and, dropping them sharply, tipped back her head and opened her mouth wide. Her teeth—all flat and white—parted her lips, and her mouth just kept getting wider and bigger. It didn’t stop. Sophie couldn’t see her T-shirt anymore—the girl had become just one huge mouth. The bottom of it touched the floor and her tongue lolled out like a fat slab of wet fish. With a slurp she pulled it back in and the huge jaws slowly closed and shrank until the teeth were covered again by lips, and there was just the girl.

  Sophie was shaking like a leaf; she couldn’t utter a sound.

  She pressed herself back against the cupboards. The girl wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, then the back of her hand on her Minnie Mouse T-shirt.

  “I said I could,” she purred in that same horrible way.

  The boy was standing next to the girl now. He was looking at Sophie too.

  “And we can open our eye really wide.”

  Sophie shook her head weakly and her voice was small, like a mouse—she didn’t want to see.

  “No.”

  The boy put his fingers below his eye, then he reached across until he was holding the skin with both hands, and pulled it wider and wider. The skin stretched away until he held his arms wide. It was like looking into a dark sack. Sophie felt her breath stop in her chest.

  There was something in the sack.

  First one hand, and then another, gripped the lip of skin and, as steadily as if he were clambering over a low fence, a man made of strips of torn leather and dirty cotton stepped out of the boy’s eye and into the room.

  The boy let the skin of his eye close with a snap.

  “Him and me,” said the boy. “We’re Tom.”

  The leather-and-cotton man had a bent back and flattened nose. He grinned malevolently at Sophie. His teeth and eyes were white against his puckered, tanned face. He made to take a step forward, but the boy touched his sleeve and the man stopped. Sophie could see the man trembling to his very heels, every fiber of him wanting to be let go, like a dog on a leash.

  “Now we can play chase,” said Tom. “We’ll chase … ”

  “… and I’ll catch,” said Lucy. Her eyes were bright and sparkling, a
nd she bit at the top of her lip as she said it. “It’s better if you hide, though,” she said.

  “Then we have to find you as well,” said Tom. “And that makes chasing much more fun.”

  “Let’s count to fifty,” said Lucy.

  “Sixty,” said Tom.

  “No,” stammered Sophie.

  “One,” said Tom. The leather-and-cotton man was staring at her with his white eyes and white teeth; he was quivering with excitement.

  “You’ll have to hide—quick,” said Lucy, and clapped her hands.

  “Two,” said Tom.

  They didn’t try to stop her. They just watched her run. Sophie went blindly down the hall, clattering to a stop against the front door, grabbing at the catch, but the door wouldn’t open. She twisted and pulled at it as hard as she could, but it wouldn’t budge. Behind her, she could hear them counting. They were already at eighteen.

  In utter panic she ran into the big front room and like a bird against the glass tried the window catches one by one—she could see the garden and the fishpond and the sundial, but the windows wouldn’t open, and the glass was so thick and heavy. It wouldn’t break even when she hit it.

  And they were still counting.

  Through her panic a voice in her head—the only quiet thing in her—remembered what the girl had said about the phone—about the signal.

  They were still standing by the kitchen door. She fled past them and up the stairs onto the landing. There were stairs again after that and she took them two at a time. As she reached the top one she turned and listened—she could feel her heart thumping in her ears.

  Downstairs, the counting had stopped.

  The lights in the hall clicked out.

  In the dim, almost dark, she heard a sound on the stairs below her, like the movement of leather and cotton.

  Then she heard a whisper that carried in the dark: “Let’s look in the bathroom.”

  It was the boy.

  She saw the shape of him run, quick tippy-toes on socked feet, across the landing below her, then come back again.