The Wrong Train

by Jeremy de Quidt

  He closed his eyes and opened them again, but nothing changed. He was sitting in a small, low kitchen with a stone floor under his feet and dark wooden beams above his head. The beams were wound with dried flowers and leaves, and between them hung bright copper pans and cooking knives and ladles. A fire was spitting and crackling in an iron stove as though a bundle of sticks had only just been stuffed into it, though there was no sign of anyone who might have done that.

  He sat openmouthed, staring around him, because dreams didn’t begin like this. It felt more like some complicated trick, and he half expected his mom or someone else to come in and laugh, and tell him how it had been done.

  Only they didn’t.

  The fire crackled and spat. He could feel the warmth of it against his face.

  At one end of the room was a small window, and at the other a black oak door. Between them, the plaster was covered with paintings, all bright and garish. He looked at them more carefully. In one a woodsman, half wolf, half man, was howling at a moon that shone through the branches of the trees. He carried an ax in one hand and a head by its hair in the other. Beside him was a picture of two children—lost and starving—walking across a carpet of leaves through a wood that was full of eyes. The third was a little man with a sharp, bright knife. He was crouched at the bottom of a sleeping child’s bed, his hand drawing the covers away. Jos sat unwillingly looking at that one for several moments. It was so full of threat. Then his eyes moved on to the next. A carter lay on a lonely muddy path through a forest, with his head crushed beneath the wheels of his wagon, and in the last, a coffin gaped open and empty in a churchyard at night.

  They were disturbing in a way he couldn’t even begin to describe—as though each one was a picture of something that had actually happened.

  He sat staring at them. He might have sat there longer still, but the longer he sat, the more anxious he felt. Somewhere, someone had to be watching him, laughing at his confusion. He knew that if he were just to get up and look around, he’d find out soon enough how all of this was being done. So he stood up and peered through the glass of the window. A deep fall of snow carpeted the ground outside, and a path disappeared between thick fir trees into a deep, dark forest.

  However the trick had been done, the world outside the window looked perfect. Even the glass felt cold to the touch. He breathed on it and wrote his name in the condensation. Then he noticed the ticking of a clock and he looked around to see where it was.

  The clock was in a case on the wall. The case was the size of a small cupboard, though the face was smaller than a saucer and painted with delicate little flowers. Weights hung beneath it, and a pendulum swung slowly to and fro behind them. The whole thing was carved to look like a forest with a cottage hidden, all secret and deep among its trees. He looked again at the window, at the snow and trees outside, then again at the clock. This was the same cottage as on the clock, the same forest outside the window.

  From inside the case a whirring began and, as he watched, the front of the cottage popped open. One by one a scene of little painted wooden figures began to move slowly, in fits and starts, through the rooms of the house. They were the same as the figures painted on the walls. When the mechanism finally lurched to a halt, it was only the little man with the bright knife that was left. It was a relief when the front of the cottage snapped shut and he couldn’t see the little man anymore.

  He glanced then, uneasily, at the other things in the room. He didn’t know how this trick had been done, or why, but he wanted it to stop now. He crossed the stone floor and laid his hand on the iron latch of the black oak door, lifted it, and pushed.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness that was there, and for him to realize where he was.

  He was standing in the open door of his own wardrobe.

  He could see his bed and the shadowed shapes of things on the floor, all outlined against the light of the streetlamp behind his curtains. Behind him through the wardrobe door he could see the little kitchen, the case of the clock and the paintings on the wall, but no light came from that place into his bedroom, not even from the snow-bright window. His room was velvet dark, and silent.

  By the single crack of light that came through a gap in the curtains, he could see himself lying in the bed, see his own face on the pillow—eyes closed in sleep. The bed was arranged just like the bed in the picture painted on the plaster wall, right down to the sheets turned back, just so. All that was missing was the little man with the bright, sharp knife in his hand, and suddenly Jos knew whose cottage in the woods it was.

  He just knew.

  He glanced back at the day-lit room and, reaching out to his own bed, he shook his sleeping self by the shoulder, because he knew he had to wake up—but the sleeping him wouldn’t wake. It didn’t so much as stir, no matter how hard he shook it. He could feel the warmth of his own sleeping body like it was another person’s, and that was so strange a thing, because it was him.

  With that certainty of dreams, because that was what he told himself this must be, he knew he had to leave himself some sign, something that on waking would prove to him that all this had happened, and then he would know that the wardrobe door was going to open in the night while he slept and let in a little man with a razor-sharp knife.

  He pulled a handful of dried flowers and leaves from one of the beams in the bright kitchen and, shutting the wardrobe door behind him, he strewed them in the dark over the bottom of his bed like a meadow of warning. Then he stopped and listened. For a while he heard nothing, then distant and far away—as if from over a hill and through a forest and a fall of deep snow—he heard a rasping sound, like a knife being sharpened on a stone.

  The light in his face was so sudden, so bright, he had to shield his eyes with his hand.

  “What you doing sitting in the dark?” said his mom.

  She’d banged the door open with the bags of shopping and flicked on the light switch with her chin.

  “I thought you were out it was so quiet.”

  His phone had slipped from his fingers to the floor, and he leaped from the chair as though it had bitten him.

  His mom pulled the curtains closed—asking what had happened in his day, and what he wanted for dinner—but he hardly heard her.

  It had been so believable—was still believable, even on waking.

  He went through the house turning all the lights on—the landing, the bathroom, his bedroom—then stood looking uneasily at his wardrobe door and the covers of the bed, and it felt as though he’d been there only a moment ago and seen himself asleep. He half expected to see the dried flowers strewn there, but there were none. Not even sure it was safe to do, he opened the wardrobe door, but there was nothing there either, only junk and clothes, and the back of it was just white plastic and wood.

  He felt so stupid. Relieved and stupid.

  But when he came to go to sleep that night, it didn’t seem so stupid at all. It seemed so very real again—as though the only thing in the whole room was the wardrobe door. He didn’t want to turn the light out. He sat with his bedside lamp on and his back against the headboard, watching the door. He heard his mom turn off the lights downstairs and come up to bed, heard the heat switch off and the radiators cooling down, but he still didn’t want to turn the lamp out. Its light seemed thin and cold and the dark on the landing even darker as the night dragged past, but he didn’t want to turn it off. He tried leaving the wardrobe door open so that he could see what was inside, but somehow that only made things worse—as though something might actually part the clothes as he watched—and he got out of bed into the cold and shut the door again. Put his sports bag against it so that he could hear if it opened.

  But finally, it was only sleep that crept into his room and took him.

  Jos opened his eyes not having thought he’d even closed them, and found the world full of daylight. The first thing he did was to look at the bottom of his bed, smooth his hand across the crumpled covers, but th
ere were no flowers, no leaves—nothing but bright daylight, and it rubbed all his night fears away.

  The days that followed served to do the same thing, and though he couldn’t help looking uneasily at the wardrobe before he turned his light out at night, by the end of the week he was never as convinced as he had been that first time that it held any terrors other than those he might imagine. It was just a wardrobe. The same was true for the dark oak chair. For those first few days afterward, he’d pass it like he might a dog that had recently bitten him, but by the end of the week it was just a wooden chair, and the bear was just a wooden bear, and the teeth were just wooden teeth.

  He even sat in it.

  As the days passed, the nights drew in—he needed to put the lights on as soon as he came home from school, and it was quite dark by the time his mom got in. It was a surprise, then, when, coming home one evening, he opened the door of the house to find the big oak chair stuffed into the darkness of the little hall in front of him. It hadn’t been there when he’d left for school in the morning and the only thing he could think of was that his mom had wanted to move it and had gotten it this far before she went to work. It was too heavy for her to manage it on her own, but even so, she could have left it somewhere else.

  He had to stand on it and clamber across to reach the light switch.

  He shut the front door behind him, stood on the seat, and, stretching for the light, he felt the world tip, and suddenly the darkness around him wasn’t the darkness of the hall but of somewhere else. The streetlight that had shone through the window above the front door was now moonlight across the stone flags of a floor.

  He knew where he was at once, only this time he wasn’t alone.

  Someone was lighting the oil lamps that hung from the ceiling between the ladles and pans. There wasn’t enough light for Jos to see who it was; all he could see was the spill of burning wood in the person’s hand. They were reaching up and lighting the lamps one by one. The wicks guttered and flared, and out of the darkness slowly emerged the paintings on the wall, all garish and shadowed, and, reaching up to light the lamps, a little man with a face creased like an old apple, whose teeth were stained and filed to points sharp as needles.

  Jos didn’t dare to move.

  Even with the lamps lit, there wasn’t enough light to drive the darkness from that room, but there was quite enough for the man to see Jos by, only he didn’t so much as look at him. He lit the lamps, shook the spill of wood into the fire, and, reaching up to one of the beams, took down a long steel knife. Jos watched him do it. He watched as the man sat himself at the table and, laying the blade across his lap, began to sharpen it with a small stone. In the flickering light of the fire, the edge of the blade glittered like a razor.

  Only once did the man pause. Turning, he looked over his shoulder, straight at Jos, but it wasn’t Jos he was looking at. He was looking at the carved clock on the wall, as though he was waiting for the clock to strike.

  And strike it did.

  With a whirring of cogs the front popped open and the little figures moved again in fits and starts through the rooms—the woodsman with the ax, the little man with the knife.

  The man watched them. He pushed back his chair and, crossing to the clock, tapped the dial with his nail as though to satisfy himself upon some small point of time. And then he looked at Jos. He looked right at him and grinned, and it was a wicked grin—sharp toothed, dark and full of malice.

  Jos floundered from the chair as something that smelled of rubber was pushed against his face and there was light so bright that it hurt—

  and voices and faces

  and his name being spoken

  and he was on the floor in the hall and there were men in green overalls bending over him.

  * * *

  “You fell off it,” his mom said.

  “I was trying to reach the light switch,” he said for the hundredth time.

  “You didn’t have to stand on it, you fool. You were out cold when I got in. I couldn’t wake you up. I didn’t know what to do, that’s why I called them. You gave me such a fright.”

  They’d done the whole business—wrapped in a blanket in the back of an ambulance to the emergency room, the wait in the little curtained cubicle. He had a lump the size of a goose egg on his forehead, but he could count how many fingers the doctor held up and follow them too, and that had been enough for the hospital. Now they were home again, hours later, in the kitchen with a mug of tea and a box of aspirin. His mom had wrapped a package of frozen peas in a towel and he was holding it against his head.

  “I just wanted to clean behind it,” his mom said.

  “You didn’t have to leave it in the hall.”

  “You didn’t have to stand on it.”

  They’d been through it already; he couldn’t be bothered to argue anymore. Besides, his head hurt so much.

  He took himself upstairs, washed his face and brushed his teeth, then looked at the lump—all hard and black and purple—in the bathroom mirror. He felt too sick and too tired to even care about a little man in the wardrobe as he got into bed. There are some things that are so real they make nonsense of pretend fears, and cracking his head on the bottom of the stairs was one of them. There was no little man with a knife going to come out of his wardrobe. Dreams like that were just what you got when you smashed your head against the stairs.

  All he wanted to do now was to sleep.

  He put his head on the pillow and closed his eyes. He didn’t even dream; it was as though he just fell into dark, soft silence.

  But something woke him. Some noise.

  He opened his eyes and lay listening in the dark of his room, not sure what it had been. His mom must have gone to bed, because there were no lights on and the house was quiet and still. All he could hear was the click of the radiators; they sounded like the ticking of a clock, only it wasn’t them that had woken him.

  He lay and listened.

  Through the crack in the curtains, light from the street outside fell across his pillow. In the shadowed dark he could see the shape of the wardrobe against the wall, and the outline of his things on the floor.

  He closed his eyes, but he knew that something had woken him. Something he could not put a name to. He sat up and looked again at the dark of the room. Then he reached over and turned on his light.

  At the bottom of the bed, the covers were strewn with a handful of dried flowers and leaves.

  The man reached down and scratched the little dog on the top of his head. “Getting late now, isn’t it, Toby?”

  He looked up at the boy, and for all that his face framed a smile, it didn’t touch those shard-glass eyes. They glittered in the light of the lantern.

  “Which one did you like the best?” he said.

  “You mean, I’ve just got to say one.”

  “That’s it. You get to choose.”

  The boy stood with his mouth open. He could almost have laughed, only it didn’t feel like a joke. He didn’t know what the man meant—did he mean he had to choose the one that had frightened him most, or the one he wanted to hear again? He didn’t want to hear any of them again. Or maybe the man had a book of them in his pocket and he was going to give him one to take home.

  Only they didn’t feel like book stories.

  The man sat, looking intently at him.

  “Swallow a fly like that,” he said.

  The boy closed his mouth.

  He could feel the stories moving, like dark ink in darker water—the candle, the light, the car, those children, the photos, the soot boy, the dead woman, the chair—he could hear them like whispers. And he didn’t want to have to say any of them.

  The man leaned forward.

  “Train won’t come until you do,” he said quietly.

  The boy shook his head—if that’s all the man wanted, he’d say one and be done with it.

  “All right,” he said suddenly, and said the first one that came into his head. “The one with the car.” />
  The man looked steadily at him.

  “You can change your mind,” he said.

  But the boy didn’t say anything.

  The man held up a finger in the air, as though he was going to say something more, but he didn’t. He was waiting for the boy to hear what he’d heard—

  a hissing in the rails.

  The boy turned around and looked back along the dark platform. Slowly, around a distant curve, a light was coming—a long snake of light.

  “The train!”

  He ran down the dark platform toward it waving his arms, terrified it wasn’t going to see him. It had slowed for the halt and he could see the driver in his cab as he passed. He turned and ran next to the cab, could almost keep up with the window, but it was slowly pulling away from him. He banged the flat of his hand against the glass and saw the driver turn in surprise and look at him, the driver’s face wide in amazement. Then the cars slid past the boy, all lit up. He could see men inside in their big fluorescent jackets. Then he heard the brakes of the train squeal as it ground to a halt and stopped.

  The driver got out of his cab. A man opened one of the doors and put his head out to see what was happening.

  “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” shouted the driver.

  “You going back to Parkside?” the boy answered. “I got on the wrong train. I got off here. I’ve got to tell my dad where I am.”

  He was almost in tears. He just wanted to be on the train, off the platform.

  An older man in a big yellow jacket stepped down from a car.

  “You all right, kid?” he said.

  “I’ve got to tell my dad.”

  The car had tables filled with plastic cups of tea and coffee and bowls of sugar, bottles of milk. The men were looking at him—tired men with working faces, hard-lit in the car strip lights.

  The man in the yellow jacket gave him his phone, and the boy climbed into the warm car and the doors closed behind him.

  In the light spilling from the windows, he saw the concrete wall along the platform begin to slide past. Saw the bench and the lamp poles—and for a moment he saw in the darkness the old man, standing with his lantern and his bag and his dog, and the man was looking right at him—only it wasn’t dead leaves and dead flowers that were sticking up out of his bag anymore. It was a big toy car, all silver chrome and red paint. The boy glimpsed it for only a moment; then the platform fell away and there was just the long line of car windows, black like mirrors, with reflections of the men and the tables, and the cups and bottles of milk, all strip-lit bright.