0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (37 page)

'Big business as the evil bogeyman, it's an ever-popular target for student paranoia,' complained Masters, unimpressed. 'There's no human dimension in the stories of the young. Too many issue-led morality tales, the sort they have on American television shows, nothing from direct experience.'

'Oh for God's sake,' snapped Jane, 'people can only reflect the times in which they live. There are no traditional heroes left, no explorers, no captains, no warriors. I don't know why you expect so much from others.

One thing that years of listening to you has taught me is that you're incapable of telling a decent story. It's a talent you singularly lack, because you have no perception. You're best off leaving it to other people.'

Shocked by her own honesty, she stopped herself from saying any more. An uncomfortable atmosphere settled on the table. Stung, Masters stared out into the rainswept darkness, avoiding his wife's angry gaze.

'Come on, chaps, let's not get personal.' Summerfield clapped his hands together and startled Jane, who was gazing glumly into her wine, hypnotised by the steady movement of the train. Most of the carriage was deserted now. Even the guard was dozing in an end seat, his head lolling on his shoulder. It was as though they had been freed from the shackles of time and place, the co-ordinates that underpinned their lives slipping quietly away into the night.

Claire shifted across the aisle to the opposite seat and faced them.

'I've got a story,' she said mischievously. 'About some friends of mine who got locked in a pub.' And she told it, although it didn't sound true.

'Well.' Jane cleared her throat at the end, slightly flummoxed. 'That was certainly
frank
. Although I'm not sure it's really a fit subject to turn into a dramatic piece.'

'Some people are uncomfortable around the subject of sexuality,'

mumbled Claire, meaning older people, meaning her. The senior members of the group were a little embarrassed by the girl's intensity, although it obviously did not bother Kallie or Ben. Jane drained her glass and pushed back into her seat, unsettled by what she had heard. Masters cleared a spot on the window and peered out. 'My watch has stopped. I thought we'd be able to see the sea by now. Doesn't the train run along the coast for the last hour?'

'There's not much of a moon.'

'Even so, you should be able to see something.'

The carriage shifted across a set of uneven points, and the overhead lights flickered. Electricity crackled somewhere beneath their feet.

'Maybe we're on the Hallowe'en train to hell.' Summerfield looked around. Jane was half asleep. Suddenly the train lurched hard and shuddered to a hard halt, its brakes squealing. Wine bottles and glasses toppled on tables, and several pieces of luggage bounced down from the overhead racks.

'What on earth...'

Jane blearily pulled herself upright. 'Are we there?'

'God knows where we are.' The doctor pressed his forehead against the window. 'It's pitch black out there. I can't see a thing.'

Ben retrieved his backpack from beneath his seat. 'I'm going to ask someone.'

'You needn't bother asking the guard,' said Masters, pointing. 'He seems to have wandered off.'

'Maybe he's dead,' Summerfield stage-whispered, 'drugged, shot with a poison dart, a minor character in an Agatha Christie play, someone whose Rosencrantz-like role exists simply to fulfil a duty to the plot.'

'Now who's muddling fact and fiction?' Masters asked uncomfortably.

He turned to his wife. 'Are you warm enough?'

'You've noticed it too, then.' The heating had gone off. They could hear the steady tick of the radiators cooling all along the carriage. Jane sensed that there was something wrong, as if the world had slipped a notch deeper into darkness. Panic was descending on her like a cold veil of rain. She dug into her purse for the tablets Dr Colson had prescribed, but could not find them. She had taken two earlier. What had she done with the rest of the packet? When she turned to her husband, she found that he was making his way along the aisle toward the exit.

There
was
something wrong. She needed the tablets to stop her from worrying. She dumped the purse out on to the table and began scrabbling through the contents. The foil sheet glittered between her fingers as she popped out two of the yellow capsules. Claire pulled a mobile phone from her bag and checked it. 'No reception,' she said casually. 'Anyone else?'

'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.