The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  It ran past, whatever it was, going the wrong way on the wrong line at the wrong hour, in a tunnel that was wrong, wrong, with all of night and hell and angry disregard in its rush.

  And we pulled back, peeled away, only when there was no sound (and no fog and no cutting, I was certain), no train wind or hint of its returning, no sign at all of that ultimate Night Train.

  Janice was dead when we found her. All that carefully packed life bludgeoned – no – drawn out thin and gone, cut free, snatched away. No wound that we could tell in the meagre light, just wiped of life and light and fear, all in a moment, there in that space – a mere twenty or so paces deep. Normal again, hah! Never normal. Never again.

  And when the police finally came and took us back to Katoomba and asked their hours of questions, it was left as heart attack and stupid uni students walking the tracks (apparently the engineers had not bothered to report the scaring). Sure, Lucian phoned around and word got back to us later that there was a glitch in the autopsy forensics; all the iron had been leached from her blood.

  So that couldn’t be the end of it for us.

  We went back, three of us did, some months after the court hearing. Becky and Lucian were living together by this stage, but she decided not to go along. So Lucian, Max and I drove up one Saturday night, arriving late with our torches and memorial bunch of flowers (our excuse if anyone found us at it), and after entering the tunnel from the western end to make sure there was no extra line, no branch cutting beyond, we finally agreed on the spot where Janice had died.

  There were no blood stains, of course, nothing on the hard round stones before that slick wall but moss, old cigarette packets, a candy bar wrapping, leaves and dried grass stalks, two bottle tops and a rusty nail.

  Not quite knowing why I did so, I took the nail, put it in my pocket; it was something that was real, after all, part of it, part of the place and the time and the death. Of poor, brief, stupid Janice.

  We left the flowers and drove away.

  IV Town Hall Station 1972–94

  There were four opening lines for this account I’m doing here, one for each version I’ve tried putting down, depending on which starting point I chose. One line you already have: “Every summer during our childhood holidays at Portobello, Maximillian and I would spend an hour every third day scaring the train.” But I could just as easily have started in media res, as in an earlier attempt, with: “The train winds are the best in Sceptre City” – a good line: short, gripping, promising mysterious things – then worked back through it as Dr Day suggested I do.

  Stealing a bit, really, because Sydney didn’t get its third real skyline landmark – Bridge, Opera House, finally the Sydney Tower: God’s Microphone, the Sceptre – until 1981, but as you discover as you get older in the eternal Now, you reach a point when it never seems otherwise, and you have to concentrate to remember how it really was then.

  The line is as true for 1967 as today – tonight – and writing this down again, I do remember that name as part of that time.

  Glancing back over what I’ve written, it seems that Lucian promised to be some sinister reincarnation of that stranger Max and I saw years ago. Sinister he was, with his dark good looks and strange notions, but while Max and I remained in one another’s lives after we graduated in 1970, we lost touch with Lucian and Becky who, last we heard, got married and mortgaged and snatched aside from the flow of life (or into it, depending on your view of such things).

  Max got married too, to a young high-school teacher named Pauline. Me, why, I’m Mr Popular, with relationships pretty well constantly, but have stayed single, communicating something unresolved in myself (I was told by one girlfriend who went away, vanished from my life, never answered the phone again), something tense and gripped too tightly. And I screamed during nightmares I never remembered. So, sure, I had ladies, partners, companions, in one-night, six-week, two-month lots, but never futures.

  But Max stayed in touch and stayed interested (there was too much unresolved between us as well) and he was the one who phoned in May 1972 and asked me to meet him at Giovanni’s Pizzeria at Town Hall Station to discuss train winds.

  What he said. Train winds.

  We’d tried Sydney’s train winds before, back in ’68 and ’69, standing on Town Hall, Wynyard, St James and Museum, feeling the plunging piston push of air before trains arrived, the unmistakable slipstream, warm, redolent of oil, ozone, raw metal and dark places. It could delight you, thrill you or scare you silly, and we kept at it because we almost understood something every time, recognized or remembered something, though never quite what.

  So began a decades-long series of infrequent, almost ritualistic meetings that usually started with a meal and ended with us going down onto the platforms and just experiencing the elusive telling-us-something quality of the train winds.

  All routine until a week ago.

  This time his voice on the phone had been troubled, urgent. Would I meet him? Yes. The usual place (now Alexander’s Café). Sure.

  I found him drinking coffee right there before the breathing stairwells of the Town Hall underground. He didn’t say much, not then, but we bought City Circle tickets and went to the final level where there was the weight of the city and the lives, and the familiar twin tracks laid taut, silver and humming between their double gulps of darkness. Tunnels are like seashells; you hear impossible seas when you listen close.

  We stood, toes to edge, peering off into one of those snatching gaps and then, then, we could talk, eyes on the dark in darkness, then we could.

  “You know what Janice said that night, Paul?”

  Janice? Janice? Years, moments, lives rammed together in an instant.

  That Janice.

  “What? When?”

  “Before she died. Before we went up to Glenbrook that weekend.”

  “No. I didn’t. No, I don’t, Max. What did she say?”

  Toes to the edge, we peered off into gloom, minds attuned to the faintest breath, listening, listening for the tiniest ghost-rush and whisper.

  “She’d had dreams, she said. The same dream. Ever since we decided to do the scaring. She dreamt she’d die there.”

  I resisted the hard knot of guilt, fought shame and denial, emotion locking my gut. Bloody Janice! Bloody, changed-blood Janice!

  “So?” Calm. Hard. Keeping it hard.

  “Something sharp would take her. Something sharp.”

  Thanks a lot, Max. Bringing me this. “A train?”

  There, I had named it, said it, peering into gloom. The Night Train. locomotive!

  And listened, watched the veins in the earth, those warm taut lines, worm lines, snail-slide of silver, watched the blocked-black, ocean-shell darkness. For train. Train.

  “Something sharp. I asked that too – a train? – before we set out that day.”

  “And? Come on, Max! And?”

  “She asked if trains were sharp.”

  Ohmigod! Poor dizzy Janice. So brave, so driven. So changed.

  “You never told me.”

  “Told no one, mate. You didn’t want to hear. You wouldn’t have then, would you? Another death?”

  “No.” Small word. No. Remembering Janice. Years. Summers.

  “I kept it from everyone.”

  “Lucian?”

  “No way. He’d have gone off on one of his theories. We put it aside. Just like with Rusty Cramer.”

  “So why tell me now?” Though I knew what he’d say.

  “I’ve had the dreams too, mate. Four of them. Something sharp. About trains.”

  We felt the faintest kiss of air, a hint, a flutter. It was. Oceans falling on midnight shores.

  “So we don’t do this anymore. We put it aside again, Max. It’s just memory serving up old stuff. We’ve carried it with us too long.”

  We step back right now, Max, I wanted to say. We step back. No more scaring either way.

  Feathers of air stroked our faces.

  “I just had to tel
l you. Had to let you know.”

  “Down here?” What I didn’t say was: Did the dreams scare Pauline away?

  “Needed that too. Just did, you know? It’s been too long.”

  The rush, the unmistakable smell of the pushing air, the smell. Metal on metal. Ozone. Electric fire in the underworld. Sharp fire deep down.

  “It has.” Step back now, Max. I took his arm; he let me draw him back with me, one step, two, another. “We should include Lucian. Let him know too. Talk it out.”

  “Already have.”

  “What? When?”

  “He suggested this. Said I needed this.”

  The train was there, shattering, battering, squealing down to just a silver, ribbed 10.08 to Hornsby, modern and safe, harmless again.

  We waited as people came and went, waited till the doors slid shut and it had pulled off into the undernight. I imagined it drawing the air from our lungs after it, pulling it into sighs, drawing it thin. Earth, fire, water and air.

  Max did sigh. “I’m scared, Paul. Really scared, you know.”

  “So we keep away from places like this.”

  “Does no good. I see lines.”

  “You what?”

  “I see lines everywhere. Just look down a street or an alley. There they are, clear and bright as anything.”

  Like the dark holes under trees. Black spaces in sunshine.

  “You mean it?”

  “Look again and they’re gone. But it’s not corner of the eye stuff, Paul. They’re right there. I hear a noise at night, look out the window and see them going down the street. See them in the drive, going across backyards, running right through fences. I go out to the fridge. There are lines in the living room, Paul, just right there, you know.”

  I still had his arm, was gripping it hard. I made him listen to me, told him about my own visits to Dr Day, got him to quiz me on why I’d do such a thing. No, I wasn’t having dreams or seeing lines. But I had anxieties, I said, problems relating, connecting. I had to write it out, I told him, which did seem to help. I said he hadn’t done that, was all, hadn’t sorted the coincidence of the deaths, hadn’t worked through it. Been debriefed. Talked down. That’s all.

  We agreed: no more scarings. We’d meet with Lucian, patch up the ragged bits, talk it through, the three of us. Stay in touch this time. He was easier as we left the station; I was easier, having focused my own fear and edges through Max’s own. He gave me Lucian’s address, then we phoned, arranged to meet on the Friday night. Then I put Max in a cab and never saw him again.

  V 7.13 pm

  Last night I found Lucian’s nail.

  Third opening of the four. This is the one I had before I decided to do it via Internet, get it out as far and as fast as I could. It can’t be everywhere at once. It can’t look everywhere. There have to be gaps, ways through, yes, openings.

  But time for this line anyway, bringing it nearly to the moment. One to go.

  Last night I found Lucian’s nail. Two inches long, flat round head, round body, the sort of short, dark, rusty nail you find by the dozens, hundreds, in the recycle bins of older hardware stores and in old paling fences.

  But his. His.

  Found it on the very night of the very day Lucian’s package arrived with its ninety-minute TDK audio tape and the little cardboard box and the note – the package brought in by Tilly and used to weigh down her own goodbye note on the afternoon she too had had enough of remoteness, screams in the night, failure to commit, whatever she decoded it as.

  Her note didn’t surprise me. She’d tried; I’d tried, believed I had, believed I believed I had. I tried to wish her well.

  But Lucian’s note chilled me where I stood in the hall, the words scrawled in pencil, more disturbing somehow than if they had been in blood or purple ink.

  Max’s nail. Hide it. Tell no one.

  Look for mine. Hide them. Stop it here.

  I resented the drama, the emotional grab on top of losing Tilly (with all the cumulative guilt of losing Louise and Jill, it just went on and on, back, back), but I was deeply and singly terrified too.

  Max’s nail. I opened the tiny box and saw it – just like Janice’s, like Lucian’s too I bet! – and knew Max was dead. Knew somehow, somewhere, he would be found with his blood changed, the iron gone to make this.

  Nail.

  I started to understand it then, you see. Standing in the hall, holding the small white box, with Tilly gone and the tape to play and the stupid note.

  But not Lucian. Not Lucian dead too!

  Two thoughts. Three. You’ve left me alone with this. Betrayed me. And: the Train was getting nearer.

  Then the phone rang.

  Standing there in front of it, compressed with loss, terror and disbelief, with too much unravelling of the ordinary world, I cried out and swore and would’ve shouted down the line except I thought: Tilly. Please, God, yes.

  “Paul? It’s Becky. Sorry to bother you but have you seen Lucian?”

  “No. No, I haven’t, Beck. What’s happened?”

  It went from there. Could I come over? Of course I would, left the tape waiting, unplayed, went to her place, heard how Lucian had gone with no word, no explanation. She’d waited the drunk-binge, affair-guilt, drug-down twenty-four hours (apparently he’d been hitting it hard in every sense of the word, goosed by ideas that wouldn’t go away), made the appropriate calls to friends (well, closer friends), hospitals, the police, answered their questions: no, no sign of foul play, had finally, finally, two days on, phoned me on the off-chance.

  Off-chance! On, more like it: the very day his package arrived.

  The last time she’d seen him was as she’d left for work, sitting at the kitchen table, the morning after being out with Max till all hours. With Max.

  I asked about that, heard they’d been seeing a lot of one another (without including me? So much for our meeting up again), allowed that the tape would tell me all about that.

  I looked in the kitchen as surreptiously as possible, looked there again while brewing Becky and me coffee, found it just sitting there on the bench top as if pushed to one side, that exact size and shape, would never have noticed it without looking for it.

  His. It was.

  “What’s this?” I actually asked her when she came in to help.

  She shrugged. “Don’t know. Found it on the floor.”

  No real curiosity about such an ordinary thing. It’s true when they say there is nothing more sinister than what we never suspect: teapots, cracks in sidewalks, the flutter of a curtain, the bang of a screen door, lawn sprinklers.

  Where’s the body then? I wondered. Thinking of Janice, the nail in the tunnel where she had died, the sharp thing Max had knelt on tying the rope around dead, changed Rusty. (I was putting it all together, you see.)

  We ended up sitting at the kitchen table and I pocketed the nail when I went to pour us refills, then spent the next hour considering anything and everything, me trying to be calm and caring but frantic with the need to find Lucian’s body, wanting more than anything to get out of there so I could play the tape. No police, no telling anyone till I’d played that.

  But Becky’s question brought me up short. Not the expected theories: the prospect of a clean break, running away with someone, not the improbabilities of an amnesia-inducing accident or even a thrill-kill, but words about our first days.

  “It’s all to do with Portobello, isn’t it? That convergent energy thing.”

  How you think of a thing makes a thing. How you name a thing defines a thing.

  I might have said No, gone on about how wrong it was to make Lucian’s ideas the only handle on this. But Becky had had twenty-seven more years of such talk. No doubt it did follow on, did connect up. She kept at it.

  “That’s when it all started, didn’t it?”

  I might have told her then, mentioned the nail – the nails – the tape, the scrawled note, but needed perspective, desperately needed detachment if I could get it.
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  “Let me think this over, Beck. Let me go through my old diaries, just think it through, you know, see what I come up with. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Fortunately I’d been there long enough, sitting through the silences with her, that it didn’t seem like I was abandoning her. We’d exhausted possibilities, gone from plausible to improbable, from rational to irrational. At last I could leave.

  “There’s nothing else, Paul. There’s just nothing else,” she said as we went to the front door.

  I hated her certainty, feared it. “I’ll call, I promise. The moment I have anything.”

  Then I drove home thinking, wondering, bringing it all back.

  I could have started the account like that, you see, with finding the nail, then gone back to Portobello and 1962. But I needed to pace through it for myself, just to get it out, and I’m nearly done.

  I went home and put Lucian’s nail in the box with Max’s, then slipped the tape into my sound system, pressed Play.

  There was nothing. Nothing. Just the running noise of the capstans turning, a no-sound, like the vacuum of space against an open mike, a constant waiting changelessness.

  Now that I’ve had words fade on the page in front of me, I know what to expect, but even then I wasn’t the least surprised. Once you granted the nails, the changed blood, of course you allowed for tapes that erased. Allowed them all as parts of a system – something just being recognized.

  I drank more scotch than I should have and slept, thank God, slept right through.

  Not because I was brave, more that I missed Tilly and was lonely, I went out walking that cold windy Saturday morning (this morning), just went across to the park, loving the autumn chill, how the leaves blew in waves, scurried and rustled on the paths.

  I had the nails in my pocket and had half a mind to drive up into the Blue Mountains, go to the tunnel where Janice had died, or easier, closer, to go down onto Town Hall’s lowest level and just sit there, wait out the day – in case Lucian might come to me from some impossible cutting or out of some narrow squeezed-back, folded-in part of the undernight.