By Horror Haunted

by Celia Fremlin

  Useless and unloved. If any of the neighbours didn’t know it already, they would know it now! Or would do, if she wasn’t very, very careful …! Rousing herself, Martha glanced along the coach to reassure herself that there was no oatmeal trouser-suit in sight—no official-looking personage peering covertly in her direction….

  She was surprised, faintly, to notice how much the rush-hour crowds had already thinned out. There were even some seats vacant. Thankfully, still clutching her carrier-bag, Martha sank into the nearest one. Only now had she become aware of how tired she was … how much her feet hurt. Indeed, her whole body ached with tiredness after her day’s shopping—if “shopping” was the word! She leaned back, gratefully, on the upholstered seat, and closed her eyes.

  *

  Had she dozed off? Martha sat up with a jolt, and with an uneasy feeling that a long, long time had passed. Where had they got to …? Had they passed Hammersmith Broadway, where she had to change …? Peering out through the grimy window, she caught a momentary glimpse of an ill-lit platform, dingy and narrow, and crowded with a confusion of people; but before she had been able to ascertain the name of the station, it was gone, and they were thundering on into the darkness.

  They must have passed Hammersmith long ago! That grimy, poorly-lit station they had just left was wholly unfamiliar. They must be nearing the end of the line—or—an even more disturbing thought—maybe she was travelling in the wrong direction altogether? Maybe, in her state of confusion and panic, she had got on to an East-bound train by mistake?

  Yes, that must be it! How infuriating! Now she would have to cross over to the other side of the line, perhaps wait ages for a return train…. She would be late home, that was certain! Leonard would be home before her; he would be waiting, irritable, censorious, wanting to know where she’d been … what had kept her so long? Clutching her guilty carrier-bag, would she be able to answer him brightly, convincingly? Or would she find herself blushing and stammering, and watching the weary suspicion growing in his cool, appraising eyes …?

  The train was slowing down now, and gathering her things together, Martha prepared to leave. Funny how few people there were on the train now. Just a small group of soldiers, and an old man slumped as if in sleep. The lighting was strange, too … so feeble and dim … something must have gone wrong … but at this point in her thoughts, the train ground to a halt, and the doors slid open.

  “Please, what station is this?” she asked the man who was pushing past her on to the train; but to her surprise, he merely laughed.

  “Not much odds, is it, sweetheart?” he remarked jocosely. “So’s you’re a hundred feet down, that’s all you want to worry about, a night like this! Christ, it’s bloody murder up there!”—and he passed, whistling, on to the train.

  “Well—!” Martha stood on the platform, speechless, as the train drew away. The cheek of the fellow! Was he a nut, or something …? And only now did she turn and really look at her surroundings.

  It was all exactly as she remembered it. The rolls of bedding … the deck-chairs … the snug little family parties, blanket outspread to mark out their territory on the platform, with Mum in the middle, dispensing sandwiches and cups of tea, for all the world as if this was a seaside outing! And the old men playing Housey Housey, and the kids larking about, much too near the edge of the platform, the Shelter Wardens shouting at them good-humouredly…. And Charlie … Yes, there was Charlie, in his usual place at the end of the platform, just tuning-up on his accordion …!

  “You’re new here, ain’t you, sister?” A kindly, middle-aged man addressed her; and Martha started, as if woken from sleep. “Me—Oh—!” She stopped. “No, I’m old, old!” had been the reply on the tip of her tongue, “I’ve been here more than thirty years! …”—but of course she mustn’t disconcert him with such incomprehensible nonsense.

  “N-no … I’m not staying, I’m on my way home!” she stammered, a strange, incredulous joy growing in her as she spoke. “I have to go …” but as she moved towards the Exit, the man laid a friendly, restraining hand on her shoulder.

  “I’d stop down here for a bit if I were you, sister,” he advised. “Old Jerry ain’t half going it tonight! Ain’t ’e, Sid?”—he appealed for confirmation to an older man, perched on a roll of bedding at their feet, and sucking at his pipe.

  “’sRight!” agreed this new contributor to the discussion. “’S a real bad ’un tonight! I said it’d be bad, din’ I, when them sirens went early? Not five o’clock, it wasn’t, I ’adn’ ’ad me tea! ‘I don’t like it!’ I says. ‘When them sirens goes early, it means a rough night,’ I says! ‘’E only starts up that early when ’e’s got a real packet for us! Like that Wednesday when …’”

  A clatter of running feet along the platform interrupted him. Two youths, rosy with danger, alight with glory from the terrible Outside, were racing along the platform, drunk with news.

  “The Ship’s got it!” they yelled, in that strange ecstasy of disaster that Martha remembered so well. “Yeah, the Shipton Arms! A direct hit! You can’t see it no more, it’s all nothin’, just bricks an’ smoke an’ all! Yeah, we seen it …! We was right there …!”

  This was happiness! This was glory! This was living! Martha could see it in the lads’ eyes, hear it in their voices, feel it in the gestures of their hands. This was the happiness that she, too, had known; she and Basil, glorying in their young daring, and in the young strength of their limbs, as they raced hand-in-hand through the gunfire in the empty, blacked-out streets, along a razor-edge of death, experiencing such an ecstasy as she would never know again.

  Unless …? This very night …? Just once more …? Would this dream … this magic … whatever it was … would it last just long enough for that? Were the gods indeed granting her, after thirty stagnant years, another chance?

  “I must go!” she repeated, almost choking with joy and hope. “My boy friend’s waiting for me!”—and brushing aside the kindly protests of the shelterers, she set off running up the long, long spiral stairs that led to the outside world.

  Yes, running. If she had not guessed it already, from the tremulous joy in her heart, she knew now, for certain, that she was young again. These winding, endless flights of steps meant nothing to her young limbs as she skipped and bounded upwards, the stolen dress bumping and swinging against her as she ran. So this was why she had chosen it—a dress for a young girl, so slim, so gay, so daring! She had known all along that it was right for her—for her real, true self!

  Faster she ran, and faster; up and up the echoing spiral curves, up and up, on and on, tireless as a mountain deer, knowing that there, at the top, Basil would be waiting.

  Every evening since the beginning of the Blitz he had waited for her up there. Night after night, he would come racing from his job in the West End, all the way out here, just to meet her as she came out of the tube, and to escort her safely along the Mile End Road to her home. Together they would race through the black, deserted streets, the crack of gunfire in their ears, and the shrapnel clattering on the pavements before and behind. They met no one, the empty, perilous streets belonged only to them; and as they tore through the whistling, death-ridden dark, Martha had known, even at the time, that she would never know such happiness again.

  “You shouldn’t!” she sometimes said to Basil, as she came out of the tube station into his waiting arms. “You shouldn’t! You should stop up West, it’s safer up there!” But always he just laughed, as of course she had known he would.

  “Don’t worry, love!” he would answer, his strong arms encircling her in the savage dark. “Don’t worry, I’m as safe here as I’d be anywhere! What I always say is, if it’s got your number on it, you’ll get it, no matter where you are!”

  How wrong he was!

  She was nearing the top of the stairs now. Faint gleams of blueish light from the ticket-office were beginning to play dimly on the curve of the wall, and she was becoming aware of sounds from the outside world. The cr
ackle of gunfire; the clatter of a warden’s boots, running; and in the ensuing silence, she became aware of a tension, a sense of approaching climax, which was the only memory she had of that last night. The only clear memory, anyway; the rest had been a blur of all-enveloping horror. What had happened, exactly?

  She had been nearing the top of these spiral steps, she remembered, just as she was now—the lifts were always put out of action as soon as the sirens went and so climbing up these spiral stairs when she came home from work had become a familiar routine. Yes, she had been just at the top of the flight, just coming out into the station entrance, when she had known, suddenly, that something was going to happen. She did not know how she knew, for there was no sound; no explosion, nor the ominous whistling of an approaching bomb. She learned afterwards that when a bomb is coming really near, right on top of you, then you don’t hear the whistling. But she didn’t know this at the time. All she was aware of, in those last moments before the end, was a peculiar, waiting stillness. The whole sky seemed to be leaning outwards, somehow … the air was opening out, silently, like a flower .. and then a voice—the ticket-collector it must have been—was screaming at her.

  “Get down! Get down!” he yelled, pushing her back towards the stairs.

  But he couldn’t have forced her back if she hadn’t let him. Already she had glimpsed Basil racing across the street towards her, and she could, if she had so chosen, have run forward to meet him, not back into the safety of the stairs. But back, in fact, she had run; down and down, round and round, spiralling down, down, down into safety, while outside the earth rocked to such an explosion as she had never dreamed, and that her mind could not grasp. Her ears were deafened, and her mind blacked out, and afterwards she could remember almost nothing of how it had been.

  People were very kind. “How dreadfully sad!” they said; and “You mustn’t reproach yourself, there was nothing you could have done to save him!” and of course they were right.

  Or were they? How could they know? How could anyone know? If just one person, once, in the whole history of the world, had done just one thing differently from the way they in fact did do it—who could say that it would not have changed the whole future of mankind? Who could tell whether, if Martha had run forward towards Basil, instead of backward into safety—who could tell if, locked in one another’s arms, they might not have had one of those miraculous escapes, some bizarre fluke of blast hurling them somehow into safety? One read of such things. Who could tell? Who can ever, anywhere, say with certainty what would have happened if …?

  If she had pushed past the well-meaning ticket man…. If she had defied all her own instincts of self-preservation…. If she had raced out into the black jaws of death, crying “Basil! Basil! I’m here …!”

  *

  “Ticket, please!”

  Martha stared, stupidly, as the man at the barrier waited, hand outstretched. Outside, the common-place light of peace-time gleamed on the wet streets, and she could feel the weight of her fifty-five years in every limb.

  “I—I’m sorry!” she muttered, fumbling in her bag … searching … trying to remember if she had ever even bought one….

  Soon, though, the small fuss was over—she could tell from the man’s bored, patronising manner that he wasn’t going to honour with serious reproof such an idiot criminal as this—one who didn’t even know what station she’d got on at, let alone what station she was at now. So he shrugged, charged her 20p, and let her go, out into the wet, alien night, thirty years and more away from home.

  She was late home, of course, just as she had feared, and Leonard was angry. He was angrier still when, later that evening, the store manager rang him about the dress. The man was less apologetic, this time, about bothering so important a person as Leonard, and less inclined to hush the whole thing up.

  “I’m sorry, Sir,” he said, “but I’m afraid it can’t go on. Yes, I know you always see to it that we get the goods back, and … Yes, yes, I know, but that’s not quite the point, is it? I do appreciate your position, and you have my sympathy, but all the same, next time, I’m afraid it will be my duty …”

  Martha, listening-in on the bedroom extension, heard her husband slam down the receiver, and she waited, crouched against the pillows, for the familiar storm to break. Leonard’s face, as he entered the bedroom, was angrier than she could ever remember.

  It came to an end, though, at last. Even the most blazing row cannot go on for ever. It ended, as it always did, with Martha in tears, and making hysterical promises “never to do it again!”

  But this time, with a sort of weary contempt in his voice that Martha had never heard before, Leonard extracted from her a further promise: not merely “never to do it again”, but actually never to go shopping by herself again!

  “Do you understand, Martha? You can go into Town if someone will go with you—your sister, or one of your Bridge friends, or something—but you are not to go to the West End shops by yourself any more. Do you understand?”

  And Martha, still sniffing, said that she did. She promised to do exactly as he said, and the next morning, the moment he had left the flat, she set off for the West End.

  Not for the shops, though. Oh, no, she had an errand now a thousand times more important than any shop, and a thousand times more exciting! Somehow, somewhere, she must find once more the magic tube station, the gateway into the world of her youth, the world where she belonged, the only place where she had ever truly lived.

  It must be somewhere! All that day—and the next, and the next—she travelled up and down the Central Line, getting out at this station and at that, randomly, but nowhere could she find the station of her dreams.

  She did not despair. It must be somewhere, it must! Perhaps the magic only worked if you got on at the right station as well as getting off at the right one? Which station had she got on at, that fateful night? Oxford Circus? Bond Street? Marble Arch? It might be any of them—or even Tottenham Court Road, or Holborn. This added alarmingly to the possible permutations and combinations, but Martha was not disheartened. Each evening, when she got home from her fruitless search, she would lock herself in her room and plan out her next day’s itinerary: start from Marble Arch this time, and get off at Bow … then back to Marble Arch and start again, this time getting off at East Ham…. Leonard noticed the strange, furtive eagerness about her these days, the secret purposefulness, and at first it worried him; but as the days went by, and there were still no phone calls from any of the stores, he began to relax. Perhaps, after all, she was keeping her promise …? Perhaps she had even reformed …?

  *

  It was at the end of the third week that the call came; and when, with weary dread, he picked up the phone, it wasn’t a store manager on the line at all, it was the police. His wife, they were sorry to tell him, had been killed in an accident just outside Mile End Station. A quite extraordinary accident … at the moment, it all seemed quite impossible to explain….

  It remained impossible to explain; police, doctors, forensic experts were all equally at a loss. What sort of a vehicle could it have been, and travelling at what sort of a speed, to have inflicted the extraordinary injuries sustained by the deceased?

  There seemed to be no clues at all. And of all the people who must have been present at the time of the accident (it was during the evening rush-hour), only one came forward as a witness, and that was the ticket-collector at Mile End station. And, really, he might as well have saved himself the trouble, so nonsensical was the story he had to tell, and so unhelpful to the serious investigation that was being undertaken.

  On the night of the tragedy, he claimed, he had noticed this woman coming up off the trains. She was plump, and middle-aged, and in no way remarkable; and the only reason he had noticed her was that she was running—running at top speed right towards the barrier. Thinking she was trying to get through without a ticket, he had reached out and grabbed her arm; accustomed though he was to fare-dodgers of all sorts and deg
rees, he had been amazed by the violence of her struggles.

  “Let me go! Let me go!” she had shrieked, “it’s got my number on it!”

  Thinking that she must be referring to some sort of season-ticket or special pass, he had relaxed his grip for a moment, expecting her to produce such a document; and in that split second she had broken free, charged through the barrier, and out into the street.

  And then? Well, all he could say was what he had actually seen with his own eyes; let them make of it what they could. As the woman ran, still at full speed, across the pavement outside the station, she had fallen to pieces. Yes, to pieces. No, nothing had hit her, she hadn’t tripped or stumbled, she had simply fallen to pieces while he watched. Her whole body had quietly disintegrated into a dozen bits—hands, arms, legs scattering this way and that across the pavement.

  And from this statement the ticket-collector would not budge.

  The police could make nothing of it; and poor Leonard, when he arrived on the scene, was as baffled as the rest. Lawyer though he was, he didn’t even make a very good job of identifying the body. It should have been easy for him, because, as it chanced, the head and face had escaped all damage.

  “I—I suppose it must be her,” he said slowly, staring down at the familiar features.

  Familiar, and yet wholly unfamiliar. As he gazed into his wife’s dead face, Leonard wondered, in his clear, precise, legal mind, where all that beauty had been hidden during her lifetime, and all that happiness.

  TUESDAY’S CHILD

  THE TINY MOMENT of suspense, the passing flicker of dread lest, this time, Coral would not be waiting for him at their usual table—this was all part of William’s Tuesday happiness, and he wouldn’t have missed it for anything. He paused in the doorway of the discotheque, savouring these moments of delicious terror (delicious because unfounded) while the pop music that Coral loved streamed out past him into the winter night, and his eyes searched the rosy dimness inside for a gleam of cool blonde hair, for a glimpse of pouting, impatient lips, fashionably metallic, and drawing on yet another cigarette.