by Tim Lebbon
He sat in the first seat he found and they were there within seconds.
“Go away,” he whispered. “Leave me alone.” He hoped nobody could hear or see him mumbling to himself.
“You cannot deny us,” their voice said. “Think of what you will lose.”
Adam was thinking of what he would gain. His family, safe and sound.
“Not necessarily.”
Was that humor there? Was Amaranth laughing at him, enjoying this? And Adam suddenly realized that an emotionless, indifferent Amaranth was not the most frightening thing he could think of. No, an Amaranth possessed of humor—irony—was far more terrifying.
They were sitting at his table. He had a window seat, two sat opposite, a third in the seat beside him. The fourth rested on the table, sometimes halfway through the window glass. The acceleration did not seem to concern the thing, which leaned back with one knee raised and its face pointing at the ceiling, for all the world looking as if it were sunbathing.
So far, thankfully, nobody else had taken the seats.
“Leave me alone,” he said again, “and leave my family alone as well.” His voice was rising, he could not help it. Anger and fear combined to make a heady brew.
“We are not touching your family,” Amaranth soothed. “Whatever happens there simply… happens. Our interest is in you.”
“But why?”
“That is our business, not yours. But you are in danger… in danger of denying us, refuting our existence.”
“You’re nothing but nightmares.” He stared down at the table so that he did not have to look at them, but from the corner of his eye he could see the hand belonging to the one on the table, see it flexing and flowing as it moved.
“Since when did a dream give a man the power to survive?”
He glared up at them then, hating the smug superiority in their voice. “Power of the mind!” he could not help shouting. “Now leave me! I can’t see you anymore.”
Surprisingly, Amaranth vanished.
Pale faces turned away from him as he scanned along the carriage. Everyone must have heard him— he had been very loud—but this was London, he thought. Strange things happened in London all the time. Strange people. The blessed and the cursed mixed within feet of each other, each cocooned in their own blanket of fate. Maybe he had simply seen beyond his, for a time.
He had been unfaithful to Alison only once. It had been a foolish thing, a one-hour stand, not even bearing the importance to last a night. A woman in a bar— he was drunk with his friends—an instant attraction, a few whiskeys too many, a damp screw against the moldy wall behind the pub. Unsatisfying, dirty more than erotic, frantic rather than tender. He had felt forlorn, but it had taken only days for him to drive it down in his mind, believe it was a fantasy rather than something that had truly happened.
On the surface, at least.
Deep down, in places he only visited in the darkest, most melancholy times, he knew that it was real. He had done it. And there was no escape from that.
Now, he tried to imagine that Amaranth was a product of his imagination, and those people he had met— Howards, the bug lady, the man who had ridden the unicorn—were all coincidental players in a fantasy of his own creation….
And all the while, he knew deep down that this was bullshit. He could camouflage the truth with whatever colors he desired, but it was all still there, plain as day in the end.
They left him alone until halfway through the journey. He had been watching, trying to see them between the trees rushing by the window, looking for their faces in clouds, behind hedges, in the eyes of the other passengers on the train. Nothing. With no hidden faces to see, he realized just how under siege he had been feeling.
He began to believe they had gone for good. He began to believe his own lies.
And then the woman sat opposite him.
She was beautiful, voluptuous, raven-haired, well-dressed, clothes accentuating rather than revealing her curves. Adam averted his eyes and looked out the window, but he could not help glancing back at her, again and again. Yes. She was truly gorgeous.
“I hate trains,” she said. “So boring.” Then her unshod foot dug into his crotch.
He gasped, unable to move, all senses focusing on his groin as her toes kneaded, stroked and pressed him to erection. He closed his eyes and thought of Alison, crying while Jamie caused chaos around her. Her father was long dead and there was no close family nearby, so unless she had called one of her friends around to sit with her, she would be there on her own, weeping….V C
And then he imagined himself guiding this woman into the cramped confines of a train toilet, sitting on the seat and letting her impale herself upon him, using the movements of the train to match their rhythms.
He opened his eyes and knew that she was thinking the same thing. Her foot began to work faster. He stared out the window and saw a plane trail being born high above.
Realized how tentative the other passengers’ grips on life were.
Saw just how fortunate he was to still be here.
He reached down, grasped the woman’s ankle and forced her foot away from him. This isn’t luck, he thought, not for my family, not even for me. It’s fantasy, maybe, but not luck. What’s lucky about betraying my wife when she needs me the most?
They’re desperate. Amaranth is desperate to keep me as they want me.
No, he thought.
“No.”
“What?” the woman said, frowning, looking around, staring back at him. Her eyes went wide. “Oh Jesus… oh, I’m…” She stood quickly, hurried along the carriage and disappeared from sight.
Amaranth returned. “Do not deny us,” the voice said, deeper than he had ever heard it, stronger.
He closed his eyes. The vision he had was so powerful, quick and sharp that he almost felt as if he were physically experiencing it then and there. He smelled the vol-au-vents and the caviar and the champagne at the exhibition, he saw Maggie’s cheerful face and the gallery owners nodding to him that he had just sold another painting, he tasted the tang of nerves as one of the viewers raved about the painting of his they had just bought, minutes ago, for six thousand pounds.
He forced his eyes open against a stinging tiredness, rubbed his face and pinched his skin to wake himself up. “No,” he said. “My wife needs me.”
“You will regret it!” Amaranth screeched, and Adam thought he was hearing it for the first time as it really was. The hairs stood on the back of his neck, his balls tingled, his stomach dropped. The things came from out of the table and the seats and reached for him, swiping out with clear, sharp nails, driving their hands into his flesh and grabbing his bones, plucking at him, swirling and screaming and cursing in ways he could never know.
None of them touched him.
They could not.
They could not touch him.
Adam smiled. “There’s a bit of luck,” he whispered.
And with one final roar, they disappeared.
Half an hour from the station he called Alison and arranged for her to come and collect him. He knew it was false, but she sounded virtually back to normal, more in control. She said she had already ordered some Chinese takeaway and bought a bottle of wine. He could barely imagine sitting at home, eating and drinking and chatting—one of their favorite times together—with Molly lying dead less than two miles away. He would see her passing in every movement of Alison’s head, every twitch of her eyelids. She would be there with them more than ever. He was heading for strange times.
As the train pulled into the station, his mobile phone rang. It was Maggie.
“Adam, when are you coming back? Come on, artistic tempers are well and good when you’re not getting anywhere, but that was plain rude. These guys really have no time for prima donnas, you know. Are you at your hotel?”
“I’m back home,” Adam said, hardly believing her tone of voice. “Didn’t you hear what I said, Mags? Alison’s mum is dead.”
“Yes, ye
s…” she said, trailing off. “Adam. The guys at the gallery have made another offer. They’ll commission the artwork for the same amount, but they’ll also—”
“Mags, I’m not interested. This is not… me. It’ll change me too much.”
“One hundred thousand.”
Adam did not reply. He could not. His imagination, kicked into some sort of overdrive for the past few weeks, was picturing what that sort of money could do for his family.
He stood from his seat and followed the other passengers toward the exit. “No, Mags,” he said, shaking his head. He saw the woman who had sat opposite him, it was obvious that she had already spotted him because her head was down, frantically searching for some unknown item in her handbag. “No. That’s not me. I didn’t do any of it.”
“You didn’t do those paintings?”
Adam thought about it for a moment as he shuffled along the aisle: the midnight awakenings when he knew he had to work; the smell of oils and coffee as time went away, and it was just him and the painting; his burning finger and hand and arm muscles after several hours work, the feeling that he truly was creating in fire.
“No, Mags,” he said, “I didn’t.” He turned the phone off and stepped onto the platform.
Alison and Jamie were there to meet him. Alison was the one who had lost her mother, but on seeing them it was Adam who burst into tears. He hugged his wife and son, she crying into his neck in great wracking sobs, Jamie mumbling, “Daddy, Daddy,” as he struggled to work his way back into his parents’ world.
Adam picked Jamie up, kissing his forehead and unable to stop crying. You’ll lose them, Howards had said. How dare he? How dare he talk about someone else’s family like that?
“I’m so sorry,” he said to Alison.
She smiled grimly, a strange sight in combination with her tears and puffy eyes and gray complexion. “Such a bloody stupid way to go,” she managed to gasp before her own tears came again.
Adam touched her cheek. “I’ll drive us home.”
As they walked along the platform toward the bridge to the car park, Adam looked around. Faces stared at him from the train—one of them familiar, the woman who had been rubbing him with her foot—but none of them were Amaranth. Some were pale and distant, others almost transparent in their dissatisfaction with their lot, but all were human.
The open girders of the roof above were lined only with pigeons.
The waste-ground behind the station was home to wild cats and rooks and rusted shopping carts. Nothing else.
Around them, humanity went about its toils. Businessmen and travelers and students dodged each other across the platform. None of them looked at Adam and his family, or if they did they glanced quickly away. Everyone knew grief when they saw it, and most people respected its fierce privacy.
In the car park Alison sat in the passenger seat and Adam strapped Jamie into his seat in the back. “You a good boy?” he asked. “You been a good boy for your mummy?”
“Tiger, tiger!” Jamie hissed. “Daddy, Daddy, tiger.” He smiled, showing the gap-toothed grin that never failed to melt Adam’s heart. Then he giggled.
He was not looking directly at Adam. His gaze was directed slightly to the left, over Adam’s shoulder.
Adam spun around.
Nothing.
He scanned the car park. A hundred cars, and Amaranth could be hiding inside any one of them, watching, waiting, until they could touch him once more.
He climbed into the car and locked the doors.
“Why did you do that?” Alison asked.
“Don’t know.” He shook his head. She was right. Locked doors would be no protection.
They headed away from the station and into town. They lived on the outskirts on the other side. A couple of streets away lay the small restaurant where Adam had talked with Howards. He wondered where the old man was now. Whether he was still here. Whether he remained concerned for Adam’s safety, his life, his luck, since Adam had stormed out and told him to mind his own business.
Approaching the traffic lights at the foot of the river bridge, Adam began to slow down.
A hand reached out of the seat between his legs and clasped the wheel. He could feel it, icy-cool where it touched his balls, a burning cold where it actually passed through the meat of his inner thighs.
“No!” he screamed. Jamie screeched and began to cry. Alison looked up in shock.
“What? Adam?”
“Oh no, don’t you fucking—” He was already stamping hard on the brakes, but it did no good.
“Come see us again,” Amaranth said between his ears, and the hand twisted the wheel violently to the left.
Adam fought. A van loomed ahead of them, scaffold poles protruding from its tied-open rear doors. Terrible images of impalement and bloodied, rusted metal leaped into his mind and he pulled harder, muscles burning with the strain of fighting the hand. The windscreen flowed into the face of one of the things, still expressionless but exuding malice all the same. Adam looked straight through its eyes at the van.
The brakes were not working.
“Tiger!” Jamie shouted.
At the last second the wheel turned a fraction to the right and they skimmed the van, metal screeching on metal, the car shuddering with the impact.
Thank God, Adam thought.
And then the old woman stepped from the pavement directly in front of them.
This time, Amaranth did not need to turn the wheel. Adam did it himself. And he heard the sickening crump as the car hit the woman sideways on, and he felt the vehicle tilting as it mounted the pavement, and he saw a lamppost splitting the windscreen in two. His family screamed.
There was a terrible coldness as eight unseen hands closed around his limbs.
The car gave the lamppost a welcoming embrace.
“I’m dead,” Adam said. “I’ve been dead for a long time. I’m floating in the Atlantic. I know this because nothing that has happened is possible. I’ve been dreaming. Maybe the dead can dream.” He moved his left hand and felt his father’s lost watch chafe his wrist.
A hand grasped his throat and quicksilver nails dug in. “Do the dead hurt?” the familiar voice intoned.
Adam tried to scream, but he could not draw a breath.
Around him, the world burned.
“Keep still and you will not die… yet.”
“Alison!” Adam began to struggle against the hands holding him down. The sky was smudged with greasy black smoke, and the stench reminded him of rotten roadkill he had found in a ditch when he was a boy, a dead creature too decayed to identify. Something wet was dripping on him, wet and warm. One of the things was leaning over him. Its mouth was open and the liquid forming on its lips was transparent, and of the same consistency as its body. It was shedding pieces of itself onto him.
“You will listen to us,” Amaranth said.
“Jamie! Alison!”
“You will see them again soon enough. First, listen. You pledged to believe in us and to never deny us. You have reneged. Reaffirm your pledge. We gave you a gift, but without faith we are—”
“I don’t want your gift,” Adam said, still struggling to stand. He could see more now, as if this world were opening up to him as he came to. Above the heads of the things standing around him, the ragged walls and roofs of shattered buildings stood out against the hazy sky. Flames licked here and there, smoke rolled along the ground, firestorms did their work in some unseen middle distance. Ash floated down and stuck to his skin like warm snow. He thought of furnaces and ovens, concentration camps, lime pits…
“But you have it already. You have the good luck we bestowed upon you. And you have used it… we have seen… we have observed.”
“Good luck? Was that crash good luck?”
“You avoided the van that would have killed you. You survived. We held you back from death.”
“You steered me!”
Amaranth said nothing.
“What of Alison? Jamie?”
/> Once more, the things displayed a loathsome hint of emotion. “Who knows?” the voice said slowly, drawing out the last word with relish.
At last Adam managed to stand, but only because the things had moved back and freed him. “Leave me be,” he said, wondering if begging would help, or perhaps flattery. “Thank you for saving me, that first time… I know you did, and I’m grateful because my wife has a husband, my son has a father. But please leave me be.” All he wished for was to see his family again.
Amaranth picked him up slowly, the things using one hand each, lifting and lifting, until he was suspended several feet above the ground. From up there he could see all around, view the devastated landscape surrounding him—and he realized at last where he was.
Through a gap in the buildings to his left, the glint of violent waters. Silhouetted against this, dancing in the flickering flames that were eating at it even now, a small figure hung crucified.
“Oh, no.”
“Be honored,” Amaranth said, “you are the first to visit both places.” They dropped him to the ground and stood back. “Run.”
“What? Where?” He was winded, certain he had cracked a rib. It felt like a hot coal in his side.
“Run.”
“Why?”
And then he saw why.
Around the corner, where this shattered street met the next, capered a horde of burning people. Some of them had only just caught aflame, beating at clothes and hair as they ran. Others were engulfed, arms waving, flaming pieces of them falling as they made an impossible dash away from the agony. There were smaller shapes among them—children— just as doomed as the rest. Some of them screamed, those who still had vocal cords left to make any sound. Others, those too far gone, sizzled and spat.
Adam staggered, wincing with the pain in his side, and turned to run. Amaranth had moved down the street behind him and stood staring, all their eyes upon him. He sprinted toward them. They receded back along the rubble-strewn street without seeming to walk. Every step he took moved them farther away.
He felt heat behind him and a hand closed over his shoulder, the same shoulder the bug lady had grasped. Someone screaming, pleading, a high-pitched sound as the acrid stink of burning clothes scratched at his nostrils. The flames crept across his shoulder and down onto his chest, but they were extinguished almost immediately by something wet splashing across him.
