“Wait.” Jane retrieved a small black square from her coat and flipped it open. “None here either. The service isn’t reliable in heavily wooded areas.”
At the front of the carriage, Masters pushed down the train window and peered out into the darkness, his breath condensing in the invading night air. He looked back along the curving track, but could see nothing until the moon cleared the clouds.
When the lunar light finally unveiled the landscape, he saw that there were no other carriages behind them. Theirs had been uncoupled from the main body of the train, and released into what he could only assume was a siding. It sat by itself on a gravelled incline, with low hills rolling away on either side. The sea was not in sight, not where it should have been.
He tried to see ahead in the other direction, and could make out a vague dark shape beside the track, a large, squat building of some sort. Clearly there had been a mistake, some kind of accident. He decided to head back and give a cautious report to the others.
“Well, we have no power to move by ourselves,” said Summerfield, when the situation had been explained. “As I see it, we have two choices. We can stay here and freeze our nuts off, hoping that somebody finds us, or we can head for the building you saw and try to find a telephone that works.”
“I don’t understand how this could have happened.” Jane looked over at the students, annoyed that they could be so calm and still, and by the way they sat apart, implying some kind of private pact of solidarity that did not exist among their elders. “Isn’t anyone worried at all?”
“There’s not really much to worry about,” said Summerfield. “This sort of thing happens all the time. You always read about trains overshooting their stations and passengers having to walk down the track in the dark.”
“I’m not walking along the track - we could be electrocuted!”
“I’m not saying we all do, but someone should. This looks like an old branch line. Suppose a connection came loose and we got separated when we went over the points back there? It could happen, even with advanced information systems. Perhaps nobody will be aware that there’s a carriage missing until the train reaches its destination. Maybe not even then.”
“Harold, I think your imagination is bypassing your common sense,” Summerfield admonished. “Let’s face it, you’ve never been much good in a crisis. Let’s try and be logical about this. The carriage coupling must have made a noise when it disconnected. Doesn’t anyone remember hearing it?”
Masters looked around. “And what happened to the guard? When I last saw him he was asleep in the end seat there.”
They searched the carriage, not that there were any places where someone could be concealed. The toilet was empty. The six of them were the only passengers left on board. Kallie pulled his coat down from the overhead rack. The others began donning their top coats. As they were doing so, the lights began to dim to a misty yellow. Jane released a miserable moan.
“I was going to stay in tonight,” said Claire, checking her hair in the window. “There was a weepie on TV. But I decided to join these two. Right now I could be snuggled up indoors with a tub of ice cream watching Bette Davis going blind.”
“Was Dark Victory on tonight?” asked Kallie. “I love that film.”
“Yeah, but I think it was sandwiched between Curse of the Demon and Tarantula.”
“How can you people just chatter on as if nothing is wrong?” Jane snapped.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Claire agreed, “let’s all panic instead. What exactly is in those little pills you’re taking, by the way?”
“I also suggest we make for the building further along the line,” said Masters. “Unless anybody wants to stay here.”
“I’ve got a torch in my bag,” Kallie offered.
“Well, I’m not stepping foot outside of this carriage.” Jane dropped back into her seat just as the overhead lights faded completely. “Oh, great.”
“Jane, you cannot stay here.”
“Can’t I? Watch me.”
“I just don’t think we should split up, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” Claire cut in, “look what happens when they do that in movies. Somebody gets a spear through them.”
“Please, Jane, you’re making things awkward.”
“Do whatever you want,” snapped Jane. “I’m staying here. You can make your own decision for once in your damned life.”
“Then I say we go,” said Masters, hurt.
“You can’t leave your wife here by herself,” Summerfield protested.
“You’re right, Peregrine. Would you mind staying with her? We shouldn’t be gone too long.”
“But I was going to come with you.” He looked hopelessly at Jane, who was clearly anxious for him to stay. “Oh, all right. We’ll wait for you to return.”
“Okay, who else is coming?” asked Masters. The students already had their bags on their backs. “Are you sure you’ll be all right, darling?”
“I’ll be fine, I’ll settle once you go -”
“This is Southern England in autumn, Harold, not Greenland in January,” said Summerfield. “Go on, piss off the lot of you, and come back with a decent explanation for all of this.”
The four of them made their way to the end of the carriage, leaving behind Jane Masters and Peregrine Summerfield, who layered themselves in sweaters and nestled beneath an orange car blanket that made them look like a pair of urbanised Buddhist monks.
It was lighter outside. The moon gave the surrounding wooded hills a pallid phosphorescence. A loamy, wooded scent of fungus and decayed leaves hung in the air. The track appeared as a luminous man-made trail in the chaotic natural landscape. They saw that the carriage must have rolled by itself for at least half a mile before coming to a stop at the bottom of the incline. The grass around them was heavily waterlogged, so they stayed in the centre of the track. Kallie kept his torch trained a few feet ahead.
“How far do you think it is?” he asked, pointing to the distant black oblong beside the track.
“I don’t know. Half a mile, not much more.”
“We could have a sing-song,” said Masters. “Claire, what kind of music do you like?”
“Trance techno and hard house,” Claire replied. “You don’t ‘sing’ it.”
“Anyone else know any songs?”
“Please,” she begged, “the first person to start singing gets a rock thrown at them. Ben, tell another story, just a short one.”
“Okay,” said Ben. “The woman it happened to is a friend of my mother’s, and she’s not nuts or anything. At least,” he added darkly, “she wasn’t until this happened.” And he told the tale of the lottery demon.
“Sounds to me like her boyfriend left her and she couldn’t handle it,” said Masters.
Claire gave a scornful hoot. “Typical middle-aged male viewpoint.”
“So what are we saying here, that for every positive action there is a reaction?” asked Kallie, “like you can’t win without making someone else suffer? Thanks for the morality play.”
“No,” said Ben defensively, “just that luck works in both directions. Look at tonight. If we hadn’t booked the dining car and then stayed late over our meals, if we hadn’t joined your table, we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess now.”
Something hooted in the rustling hillside at their backs. The black bulk loomed a few hundred yards ahead. Masters was freezing. His left shoe was taking in water. He hated leaving Jane, but knew she was not strong enough to walk through unknown terrain in the dark. “Don’t worry, there will be a logical explanation for this,” he assured the others. “There always is.”
They reached a concrete ramp and began to climb. “It’s a station,” said Ben, shining his torch ahead. “Milford. Ever heard of it?”
They climbed on to the platform and approached the low brick box that functioned as the main building. Masters tried the door of the waiting room, but it was locked.
“Do you think it still operates?”
asked Claire. “It’s unmodernised. They’ve got wooden slat benches instead of those curved red steel ones with the little holes. And look at the lights. They’ve got tin shades.”
“It can’t still be used,” said Ben, shining his torch through the window of the ticket hall. “Take a look at this.” The others crowded around in the halo of light. The ticket machines inside had been vandalised. The timetables were heavy with mildew and drooped down like rolls of badly-hung wallpaper. Several of the floorboards were rotten and had fallen through.
“Can you see a phone?” asked Claire.
“You’re joking. If there is one, it’s going to be out of service. Try your mobile again.”
A silence. Only the sound of their breath and the wind in the trees while Claire tried to get a service signal. She tipped the device to the light. “Still nothing.”
“We should at least try to work out where we are. Did anyone see if we passed Exeter?”
“I don’t know, Ben,” Kallie suddenly shouted, surprising everyone. “This was your idea, remember? I’m from the city, I don’t visit places with trees unless they’re the indoor kind in big pots, like the ones you get in malls. If you told me to expect rabid fruit-bats and rats the size of Shetland ponies I’d believe you because I don’t know about outdoor stuff, this is not me, all right?”
“You might have told us before you decided to tag along,” said Claire. “I’m freezing. What are we going to do?”
“I guess we either walk back to the carriage or pass the night here,” Masters replied.
“I’m not walking all the way back. Anyway, there’s no more heat or light in the carriage than there is here. Oh shit, listen to that.” From above came the sound of rain on slates.
“That does it, we all spend the rest of the night in the waiting room,” said Ben firmly. “It makes the most sense.”
“Oh, you get to decide what’s good for everyone, do you?” Claire snapped. “Of course, you’re American.”
“Just what is that supposed to mean?”
“Just that you always boss people about.”
“Only if we know what’s best for them.”
“You’re trying to make up for being beaten in Vietnam and the Gulf by telling everyone else what to do.”
“At least we’re capable of making life-decisions, which is more than you guys. I suggest you try it sometime.”
“Great advice coming from a country where people eat with their fingers and send money to TV evangelists.”
“Now you’re being offensive.”
“Come on, you two, give it a rest.” Kallie pushed between them and led the way back to the waiting room. They had to break the lock to get the door open, but found a dry fireplace with dusty bundles of wood stacked beside it.
“I read that bird-watchers use places like these as hides,” said Masters, digging out his lighter. Outside, the rain began pounding the roof. It took a few minutes for the wood to catch, but soon they had a moderate amount of light and heat. Paint hung in strips from the ceiling, but the floor appeared to have been recently swept.
“I’m going to use the john,” said Ben, rising from the corner where he had been seated glaring balefully at Claire. “If you hear a crash it’s me kicking the lock off, okay? Give me your flashlight.” He pulled the waiting room door open. “Hey, listen to that rain.”
“This is like the station inBrief Encounter.” Claire hunched down inside her overcoat. Kallie had already fallen asleep. “I’ve seen it dozens of times on TV and I always want the ending to be different.”
“I’m surprised you like it at all,” said Masters. “Surely your generation prefers more recent stuff. You’d rewrite the ending, then?”
“Only in my head. Don’t you ever do that, change the endings of things?”
“All the time, Claire.”
Kallie fell asleep in front of the fire. The rain was still pounding the platform roof. “Ben’s been a long time. Do you think we should go and look for him?”
“No, it’s okay, I’ll go,” said Masters, forcing his aching limbs into action. He checked his watch but condensation clouded the face. As he picked his way along the dark platform, he tried to imagine what had been responsible for stranding them here. The carriage had been coupled at both ends. There had been a guard in the carriage with them. None of them had been paying much attention - they’d been too busy grandstanding each other with crazy stories. Perhaps they’d missed some kind of emergency announcement. But didn’t the staff always come around and check the carriages if there was a problem? In this day and age surely people were protected from accidents of fate? Wet leaves plastered the backs of his legs as he walked. He reached the door of the ladies’ toilet, but found that it was still locked. There was no sign that Ben had ever reached this far.
He turned slowly around and studied the dim forms about him. No sound but for wind and rain. But there was a faint glimmer of light, no more than a pencil beam, from somewhere near the far end of the platform. As he reached it, he realised that it had to be from Ben’s torch, and it was coming from the underpass to the other platform. Wary of slipping on the wet steps, he descended.
* * * *
“They’ve probably found a telephone by now and called someone,” said Summerfield vaguely. “There’s really nothing to worry about.” He and Jane sat side by side in the pitch-black carriage, protected from moonlight by the hill behind them, as the art historian emptied the last of the wine into his glass. At least she had stopped crying now.
“I want to know why this is happening,” she said finally.
“That’s like trying to explain the moon, or the course of people’s lives.”
“It’s all so random, and it shouldn’t be. We’ve been telling each other stories all night, but they’re not like life because they have plots. Nothing is left to chance. All this - there’s no plot here, just a stupid accident, someone not doing their job properly.” She wiped her nose with a tissue. “I don’t want to be worried all my life. I’m tired of always thinking of others. When the children were ill, when my mother died, when Harold had his breakdown I was always the strong one. I had the answers and the energy to go on. It seems like there was never a moment in my life when I wasn’t prepared to face disappointment. I feel like a fictional cliché, the academic’s neurotic wife, and only I know that I’m not in someone else’s story, that I’m real. Well, I don’t want to be like that any more. I want someone else to take care of the worrying for a while. I want to go away somewhere warm and quiet. Where could I go, Peregrine?”
“I know a story about a special place,” he whispered.
“Is it real, though?”
“No, of course not. I don’t know anything about real places.”
“But you must do. You’re so much more practical than Harold.”
“Darling, I’m not real, any more than you are. In your heart you must know that.” And she knew he was right, for she remembered nothing before boarding the train.
* * * *
Masters reached the bottom of the dripping tunnel and peered ahead. He could see nothing but the glare of the flashlight. “Ben?” he called, and the reverberation of his voice was lost in the falling rain.
The torch lay in a shallow puddle. He picked it up and allowed the beam to cross the walls. There was no sign that anyone had been here. He continued through the underpass to the other side, but a rusted iron trellis barred the way to the opposite platform, so he made his way back.
When he reached the waiting room once more, he found it deserted. The fire burned low in the grate. Kallie’s jacket was still lying across one of the benches, but the three students had disappeared as completely as if they had never existed. Masters was a rational man. He tried to remember their faces, but found he could no longer conjure their features in his mind. Shocked, he dropped down into the nearest seat and tried to understand what was happening.
They had been on a train, and the carriage had become separated, and they had w
alked to the station . . . Jane and Peregrine were still waiting for him, that much he remembered. He had just decided to walk back to them when he heard a distant pinging of the lines. Impossible, of course, but it sounded as though a train was coming. He ran out on to the platform and peered into the murky night as the sound grew louder.
Now he saw the bright, empty carriages swaying around the bend ahead, heard the squeal of brakes as the locomotive pulled into the station and came to a sudden stop before him. The green-painted carriage threw yellow rectangles of light on the platform. It bore the initials GWR on its doors. The compartments were separate and lined with colourful prints of British holiday resorts. The seats had antimacassars on their backs. The train was a flawless reproduction of one from his childhood, but why? And how? And surely it occupied the same line as their poor stalled carriage?
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology] Page 10
