Someone could walk the Moor if they dared to, someone hardy and determined to head southwest and catch up with the railway line. (Ivybridge would have been safe enough for someone hoping not to be noticed.)
But someone determined to cross all the way to Cornwall could still slip off a tor and crack their skull, or fall into Aune Mire a few days after rainfall; that bog was an open mouth and never had its fill. A body could lie dead amid the scrub in a dress the colour of rust, and never again be found.
2.
The girl in the train car is all alone, except for the doll. She looks distracted, starved-out shadows around her eyes, not quite focused on anything and her fingers plucking absently at the waist sash of the doll teetering in her lap.
The man who sits opposite her looks over one shoulder and then the other, deliberately, to catch the eye of whoever should be coming to claim her. No doubt some tantrum got her over here alone, and he doesn’t care for it. A pliant child has her charms, but he doesn’t find willfulness amusing. Still, beggars can’t be choosers.
“And to whom do you belong?” he asks, only half-intending for her to hear.
But her fingers twitch, the doll’s head tilting another inch into his periphery, its hat tipping over its face, so she hears him. She should answer him, then, he thinks—he’s technically addressing her, and she’s old enough to know her manners.
She looks at him with her mouth pressed into a thin unfriendly line. It offends him, somehow; he’s been nothing but pleasant—isn’t he helping her look for her parents, who should know better than to leave a young girl alone in days like these?
But no one seems to be looking for her, and finally he gives up, sits back, rests a hand on the valise he never lets the porter carry. (This is the war effort, and he’s made a promise to look after it; he’s its rightful steward.) It occurs to him to move seats, but for all she looks as if she’s gritting her tiny teeth, her skin is still white as her doll’s, and her eyes are two deep blue saucers, and it wouldn’t be the first petulant little girl he’s come across in his line of work.
“Is your trip very long?” he asks, more softly. “Have you brought only your lovely doll with you? She seems very sweet. Such a pretty face, do you think she looks like you?”
It’s not really a lovely doll. It looks old, like it’s been handed down from her grandmother; its dress is the colour of a blood stain, and the roses on the brim of its hat are beginning to fade.
She fixes her eyes on him, but her mouth never moves, never even looks as if she wants to answer, as it does with the shy little girls he much prefers, who blush when you speak to them and stammer thankfully if you press a piece of Brighton rock into their clammy hands. Ungrateful girl, he thinks, looking at the fold of her socks above her black buckled shoes pointed at him like accusations; isn’t he keeping her company, when she could be here all alone?
“I said you have a lovely doll,” he says, feels the sharp edges of his words but does nothing about it. “Let me see her.”
The girl’s face shifts, her eyes narrowing, but she tilts the doll slightly upward to his gaze.
The doll’s eyes aren’t lost under her hat as he’d suspected, the man realises; the doll’s eyes have been blacked out with something dull that reflects no light, and when the train passes under a stand of trees he has the sudden crawling sense that the doll is soaking up those shadows, too. Its mouth is lipless, just a thin, poisonous line on the verge of speech, on the verge of saying something terrible.
“Taunton Station,” the conductor calls, and the man startles (it can’t be, has the train grown wings?), but when he looks out the window they’re sliding along the banks of the Tone, and any minute the station itself will pop sidelong into frame like a spool gone astray at the cinema.
He stands up before it’s strictly necessary, brushes at the front of his jacket, wraps his hand around the handle of his valise until a knuckle pops.
“Mind the platform,” he mutters as he moves for the door. “A girl your size might fall in, and if they knew your temper they wouldn’t exactly run to your aid.”
On the platform a poster blazes in colours, gold sand and bright blue water and a handful of people in candy-coloured bathing suits under the block-letter shout of CORNWALL, promising MILES OF BEAUTIFUL SHORE ALONG THE WESTERN RAILWAY LINE.
He can just see the top of the girl’s blonde head, a flash of a white satin bow, but the rest of the window is murky, as if no light at all is getting out.
###
By 1940, he’s the third most successful door-to-door man in the company, which is just enough to get him a raise and a slightly larger circuit. He only sees the inside of the London office when he’s dropping off papers. The war effort needs him on the Great Western Railway.
Last fall it had been chaos in town, children everywhere until it felt like he was being punished for every sweet face he’d ever lingered on too long, a sea of solemn expressions and little smears of jam from some homemade sandwich their mothers had pressed into their sticky hands as they boarded a train for countryside destinations unknown. They were all polite, so there was no reason it should have made him uneasy—they were so terrified they would have been grateful for any sort of kindness—but there were so many of them, and some looked out from under the brims of their caps like their eyes soaked up the shadows, and his Brighton rock sat in his suitcase untouched.
There are no more posters for tourism—sometimes you see a sliver of one underneath a poster of handsome young soldiers running for glory, or beatific families standing amid the garden of English pride. The daughters are almost always golden-haired, and he never really looks at them for long; his eyes sting, or something passes by behind him and he glances over, and by the time he’s settled his mind about whatever the matter is, the train’s moved on and there’s nothing outside the window but open hills and the thickets of green.
###
He has a flat in London, but it’s never looked like much besides a hotel room without the service, and the bombs have hardly made it more appealing, so there’s little reason for him to take the holidays when the office suggests it. There’s nothing much to stay in London for—he doesn’t care for theatre, even the ones that are still standing—and the idea of getting on a train for pleasure makes him slightly ill, by now.
But eventually the office begins to insist, and so he agrees to take a long weekend and leave on his next circuit two days later than planned. The city’s as awful as he remembers, but at least he gets to walk the path to his mother’s house mostly free of rubble, which fills him with some small amount of personal satisfaction he chooses not to examine; the war bonds pay for street cleaning as much as they pay for bombers, he’s certain. Every little bit helps.
It startles him to read the news about the accident near Taunton, the day he should have been there. Out that way, the best way to get a housewife to listen to you is to let your vowels drop a little longer and lower than they do in London, to offer up a little Brighton rock to the little girls that crowd the doorway and doff your cap respectfully to older boys. He knows just what it looks like there, when the train pulls away from Taunton station and starts the curve toward Western Somerset, where he’s never seen the beaches for the spreads and spreads of green.
But he’s always been a man of circumspection, and it doesn’t escape him, when he opens his eyes in the pitch black to the wail of the air raid siren, that a man from the War Bonds office being bombed to death on one of the three days a month he spends at home is something that the papers will talk about.
Still, he doesn’t have long to worry about it.
3.
The girl in the train car is all alone, except for the doll. She looks tired—shadows under the eyes—but it seems as if she’s fighting it, sitting back against the seat as tall as she can. Her doll’s standing, too, though when her hands slip lower on its waist, it bows forward like it’s sinking to sleep.
The train pushes out past Plymouth, clacking
west through far-off villages into places where the greenery can barely hide the rock underneath, a layer of glossy enamel brushed just over the stone, ridged and rolling toward the water, and you hope that sooner or later you’ll be able to mark the sea.
It’s a terribly old-fashioned train car, with the seats so worn they’re more springs than padding. It didn’t look quite so shabby from the outside, but that’s Great Western Rail for you.
Why you sit across from the girl who’s alone instead of looking for another car, you can’t say. You aren’t fond of children. The seat across from her looks wider, though, more open. And it’s the only one left that’s facing front—you can’t sit backwards in trains. You say it makes you sick. Really it’s something about only seeing things once they’ve slipped past you that gives you the shivers, but that wouldn’t get you anything but strange looks. No point explaining. Better to admit to a weak stomach than sound like the sentimental sort.
It’s raining out, leaching everything of colour, and as the train rolls in and out from under dark clouds it casts everyone into melancholy greys.
You smile at the girl to reassure her, say, “I don’t like the rain either,” just in case she’s frightened more than she is tired. Why she’d be frightened of a light rain you don’t know, but the oddest things used to frighten you, so it can’t hurt.
As the train picks up momentum, it rocks back and forth at that magic speed that always used to put you right to sleep all the way to Newbury—and sometimes past it, if you weren’t careful. The conductors were always very sweet about it, but three felt like the ceiling for times you could trudge across to the return-journey platform with a ticket and bleary eyes and trust the conductor to let you back on with nothing but a warning. You’ve been more careful since, and if you’re too tired to stay awake under your own power (which is almost always), you try to do something that will make you too uneasy to go to sleep. Sitting across from a child, for example.
Still, it’s exciting to be on board the train, farther west than you’ve ever tried before. Not that you expect to be happy—this train car’s not changing your circumstances, just the geography—but maybe a change in geography is enough.
The girl’s watching you. She looks uncertain, still weighing something, but you’ve probably been found wanting; that’s how it usually goes.
“Are you all right? Can I help?”
She shakes her head, barely, not even enough to disrupt her fresh-curled hair. The doll in her lap shifts backwards an inch or two, and for a moment it startles you into thinking something that gives you the shivers, but it’s just the girl reaching out to cage the doll’s arms in her fingers and pull it back tight to her chest.
You weren’t going to take it. You’re sorry that’s what she thinks of you. Still, she wouldn’t be the first person to assume the worst of you; you must just have one of those faces.
The land here shouldn’t be as different as it is, only a handful of miles to the west, but somehow it is, like the nearness of the sea has settled over everything and made it seem closer, better.
“Where are you going?” asks the little girl, with a voice that sounds long disused. You wonder if she’s been on this train all the way from London, with no food or drink. Oh God, maybe she’s run away, and you’ll look like a kidnapper.
“My ticket’s for Penzance,” you say, glancing down the aisle for a conductor, but even as you say it you get the feeling she already knows exactly where you’re going, and that she’ll be going all that way with you.
It feels too far west, suddenly. Horribly far west, for no gain—there are other places close to the sea, without being quite so far beyond the reach of home. (Strange thought; you haven’t considered that factory-choked Northeast town home in a long time. Must be the rain.)
When the conductor calls for Truro, the girl shifts in her seat. Under her hands, the doll looks as if it’s trying to get footing. The girl grips it tighter.
You reach for your traveling case.
“Safe journey,” you say as you stand, and she glances at you sidelong, unsurprised you’re getting off early. That’s all right; you’re not surprised she looks like she expected to have the seat to herself the rest of the way.
The clasp on your suitcase breaks just as you head for the station exit, and by the time you’ve packed it again and wrapped it shut in your nicest scarf (the only one long enough to hold the damn thing together), a train’s arriving from the Falmouth line. A little girl steps off the train between her parents. Her dress is the blue of a robin’s egg; the bow at the end of her braid is white.
You get on the train.
Penryn isn’t a bad place to live. You spent the next forty years making sure. The seasons are fine, even if your knee aches a little with the damp, and work is all right so long as you don’t mind the blisters and the skimping pay.
The only thing that really grates—besides your landlady, who occasionally bangs on your door before dawn and accuses you of making noise when it’s just the owls that live in the kitchen eaves—is the toy store. It has a pile of dolls in the window, a halfhearted jumble set out next to the trains. It looks disrespectful, somehow, but that’s the sort of thing you know better than to say. You’re not the shopkeeper, and you’re not about to buy one of them, and what other reason would you have?
You never go a step farther west; the thought of getting on the Western Rail makes you uneasy, though you try not to think about why. No point in sounding like the sentimental sort.
4.
The girl in the train car is all alone, except for the doll.
The train stops at Penzance, only a handful of steps from the shore. At high tide, it looks as though the water’s trying to suck at the wheels of the train and drag it under. If there were ever a storm strong enough, a whole train might disappear under the waves some night with no one the wiser.
There’s service here, for anyone who wants to make it all the way to Land’s End. The Great Western Railway has left no track unturned; it wants to see the whole thing through, right to the end of the line.
When the conductor walks through the train to make sure all passengers have disembarked, he leaves her be; he glances up at the luggage rack and down at the floor and never lingers on her.
The girl with the doll doesn’t move for a long while. She doesn’t turn to look at the afternoon sun scattered in pieces over the waves, doesn’t glance out the window where the shoreline curves toward the entrance to the quay. They put flowers out in summer, if you were lucky enough to see it, flowers tumbling everywhere. (“Only six and a half hours express to the most beautiful coast in the world!” the advertisements promise, under a watercolour of a village always empty of people, or a beach spotted with a handful of the fashionable sort.)
Eventually, the train will sigh and squeal and lurch forward again, heading slowly back for London, past the sea and the cities and the moors.
The little girl won’t be there. She’ll be walking down the quay in a school dress of serviceable blue the colour of the sea just after the sun goes down, before it’s really night. A secondhand doll of the old-fashioned kind will be tucked in the curve of her arm, her elbow gently squashing the rosettes. She’s already scratched its eyes off with her charcoal, because green eyes looked too much like the eyes of a headmistress she’d quarreled with.
The quay is dotted with couples walking arm in arm, and one or two families, and one old man with a dog that looks like the old man, somehow.
The girl sits on a bench facing the bay, where the water level sinks inch by inch as you watch it, until some of the ships hit bottom and tilt over. It always makes her grandfather smile and tell a joke about the old drunk sailor, a joke she’s promised never to tell her mother and father.
He’ll be here soon. She sets the doll in her lap, and smooths the deep red skirt, and settles in to wait.
Reggie Oliver
THE ROOMS ARE HIGH
A man that looks on glass
On it
may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass
And then the heav’n espy
— GEORGE HERBERT
“You could always stay at old Ma Carsett’s, I suppose,” said Lockwood. “Never went there myself, but I heard good things. But of course you must always remember ‘the rooms are high.’”
“What do you mean ‘the rooms are high’?” Savernake asked. “I thought you said this place was inexpensive. Do you mean the prices are high?”
“No, no. Just ‘the rooms are high.’”
“You mean the rooms have high ceilings, or that they’re high up? Or what?”
“No. This is just what several chaps who’d been there told me: ‘the rooms are high.’”
“Didn’t you ask what it meant?”
“There seemed no point since I wasn’t going to stay there.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
“Just passing it on, old chap, since you are going there, or might be. ‘The rooms are high.’”
Lockwood gave him what Savernake assumed was meant to be an enigmatic smile. Savernake had known Lockwood since they shared a set of rooms in their first year at Oxford nearly forty years ago and was both amused and irritated by him. They had kept up this rather odd friendship, and at least once a year they would have lunch at Savernake’s club and at his expense. Savernake had become a solicitor and Lockwood an actor.
Lockwood was no fool but he had the actor’s tendency to vagueness and imprecision where facts and figures were concerned. This inability to impart an exact meaning concerning Mrs Carsett’s rooms at Norgate was a typically annoying example.
It was not long after the death of his wife that Savernake felt the need to get away. None of the familiar reasons seemed quite to correspond with his feelings. His wife’s last illness had been too protracted for him to feel anything but relief when she finally went. At the same time, though childless, it had not been an unhappy marriage and Savernake sensed the loss of a valuable part of himself without being able to define precisely what it was. For several years while he had been looking after his wife Savernake had taken no holidays, despite the advice of friends that he must have “a break.” Now it was all over the need suddenly asserted itself, so that it became almost an obsession; and the fact that he could not define a precise reason for the need made it no less urgent. All the same this ignorance annoyed him: his solicitor’s professional deformity clamoured for unambiguous causes.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three Page 29
