by Ellen Datlow
Then a voice hisses in your ear: “Let’s go.”
You drop your phone to the table with a clatter. Behind you, the mother is pulling her little girl by the arm. “Let’s go,” she repeats and the child trundles along behind, still holding the lollipop in one fist. As they reach the foyer, the little girl turns in a flounce of pigtails. She sticks her tongue out at you, stained filthy black, and turns to follow her mother.
Eight twenty-seven. Eight-one-six. Eight-oh-five. Another hour and a half and the train stops in Dijon. You’ll get off and find a hotel. Call your doctor. Six in the morning back home. There might be a bus to Venice at daybreak. If you call the conference organisers first thing, they may even reschedule you to the following day. Can they do that? Does that happen? You look at the list of articles you should be reading. You have no idea.
Sliding your phone back into a pocket, you turn off your tablet and stand. The remains of your steak are a small carnage on your plate. You leave the hubbub of the dining car and head back to your couchette. The lights still flicker in the corridors. You are counting down to Dijon. You feel better.
When you open the door, Madame is back by the window, sitting wilted as if she had never left. When you had seen a bruise, a new graze reddens her cheek like rouge and her eye is now swollen shut. Shorts is sitting across from her, reading his phone. He smiles as you sit down: “Dinner any good?”
You’ve had better, you tell him. Then you lower your voice, although you’re not sure that the woman across the aisle can understand you anyway.
“What happened to her?” you ask.
He looks over. “Shit!” he hisses. “What the fuck?”
Madame has a quilted cosmetics bag open on her lap, brimming with plastic cases of lipstick and eye shadow. She dabs her finger in a jar and smooths lotion onto her face. Her swollen eye is blushing blue on purple, deepening as you watch. As she rubs at her skin, she opens up a gash on her eyebrow, which weeps a trickle of red down her bloated lid.
“Je suis désolé, madame,” you say. “I hope you don’t mind us talking. Est-ce que ça va? ”
She blinks. “Sorry,” she says. “I don’t speak French. But sure, talk all you want.”
You look around her for that French magazine. You try to remember what she had said when they came to get the tickets. You apologise again, in English. She shrugs and digs through her cosmetics. You think of Shorts on the phone, berating his girlfriend. He was talking about some kind of research position. Your empty stomach clenches tight.
You turn to Shorts. “You got reception out there, then?” you ask, your voice level.
He shakes his head. “Nothing since Paris—you got some?”
You steel yourself. It feels as if the next thing he says will either break through the night like a light switch or lock down the churning storm, with you on a train careening helpless inside. You are ready. “You were on your phone back there,” you say.
He shrugs. “Nah, not me.”
“I mean back near the dining car. When I went past to eat. You were there talking on your phone.”
He smiles and draws his brows together. “I don’t get you. I didn’t eat on the train. I had something before I got on.”
“I didn’t mean—” You break off, watch his face. He really seems to have no idea. “Forget it,” you say. You smile, lean over with your hand out and give your name.
Shorts grips your hand. “Dan,” he says.
“Dan,” you repeat, nodding. You lean back in your seat. The storm howls mutely beyond the beige curtains. “You know what, I have some reading. I might go back and maybe get some dessert.”
You stand, pull a sheaf of registration papers from your suitcase. There are three black drops on the carpet between the benches where it could have been that a woman stood with her arm bleeding below her sleeve. You duck back into the corridor. Shorts stands as you leave, leans on the doorframe.
“If you pass one of the staff, get them to come and make up the bunks, hey?”
You nod, sure, salute him with your papers. Your face feels hot. You wipe a hand across your mouth and chin, check your palm. Clean. You’re not hungry and you have no intention of reading anything. You hold on to the smooth security of the registration papers, look up at the fluorescent tube mounted on the ceiling by your door. The light is dazzling, and when you look back at the glossy black of the window, the after shadows of the light throw blind smears on your vision and the reflection of your face is a void on the image of your body. Down the corridor you hear a murmuring chatter from a group of travellers outside their couchette. You blink, peer at your watch. You can just make out the time. Nine-oh-nine. About three quarters of an hour until you stop in Dijon. You’ll sit for a while in the dining car, then come back for your suitcase. You really should wash your face again. Eight-nine-eight. Eight-eight-seven. With each count you turn back time another notch. Take off another eleven. Another ration of fear. Eight-seven-six. Eight-six-five.
“Hey,” says Dreads behind you. You guess she has come back from the toilets; she has a little tote over her shoulder.
“Oh, hi,” you say. “I was just—”
“Oh my God.” She is standing in the doorway. “What happened to your face?”
Madame gazes blankly from her seat, a compact open in her hand.
“Hang on,” you tell Dreads. “Just come here for a second.” You step away from the doorway.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. It’s the same as before with the attendant. She doesn’t know.” You gesture helplessly at your own face. “Just wait. Can you listen to something for me?”
Dreads digs her fingers under her scarf and scratches her hair. “What?”
“Just listen.” You tuck your registration papers under your arm, pull your phone from your pocket and click on the speaker. You dial your voicemail, which connects like before. “It shouldn’t even be able to do that,” you say. Dreads doesn’t answer, just looks from your face to your phone. The message runs.
Dreads narrows her eyes. “Alice?” she asks. “No—Alex. What is she saying?” She looks at you. “Is that you?”
“No—do you think that’s a wrong number?” You play it through again.
“What else could it be?”
“It’s just . . . I don’t know.” You hang up on the message. You are suddenly angry.
Dreads is staring through the doorway, where Madame is gazing back at you both through one good eye. Dreads shakes her head. “What about him? Have you talked to him? Dan?”
Alex, you think. “I tried,” you say. “I don’t trust— I don’t think he understands. Anymore. Look, I’m getting off in Dijon.”
“What’s going on?” asks Dreads.
Down the corridor, the cluster of travellers spreads out to let another light-haired attendant out from their couchette. They file into their room, emptying the corridor around her. “I don’t know what’s happening,” she says. “But we can’t stand here and say nothing.” She walks towards the attendant.
“Wait!” you shout.
“Excusez-moi?” asks Dreads. She reaches the woman, who turns with a bland smile. “We need help. With a passenger.”
“Alice,” says the attendant. Her voice is soft with hatred. You take a step towards them as she continues. “Why are you even coming to me now? You turned your back on everyone.”
“Don’t you throw that in my face.” Dreads’s tone is suddenly cold and dead, like glass. Her hair is pitch dark beside the attendant’s blonde. “She’s my mother too, and I don’t care any less than you do. You said I betrayed her when I moved out; you’re just doing the same thing now. That’s fine. Run to Alex. Run to your rich, dickhead boyfriend. Just don’t expect anything from me.”
The attendant shakes her head: “That’s bullshit. You never gave a shit about Mum. That man is a fucking monster. Go over for once. See for yourself what he did to her face.”
Dreads shoves her away and shoulders back past y
ou so you’re standing between them. “She’s not my problem to fix,” she calls back. “For years I told her she had to get out. I’m finished trying to make her listen. When you fall down, you just have to pick yourself up. Mum used to say that. Well, that’s what I’m doing. I’m done.” She slams the door to your couchette.
The attendant leans forward and screams: “Fuck you, Alice.” Then the two of you are alone. As the rumble of the train wheels thrums below your feet, you realise that you had not been able to hear either of their accents at all. The storm is out there and you know somehow that now it will never end. You look the attendant full in the face.
“It’s you,” you say.
She widens her eyes and strides towards you. You back away down the corridor, away from the direction of the dining car. All the doors are closed and she hurries you backwards, pulling up so close that you can feel the warmth from her breath in your face. Another attendant, another face, eyes shining from surrounds of green, but you see now that every one of them is really the same. All of their faces, no matter their features, are just the blushed blonde with a pair of green-rimmed eyes from the platform. One of her sleeves has a pencil-thin tracing of russet in a tide-line above her cuff, as if a stain had been imperfectly washed. She cocks her head.
You take another step back and come up against the handles of the door to the next car.
“What do you want with me?” you ask.
She smiles, head still cocked. There is blood between her teeth.
“What were you arguing about with the backpacker?”
“Alex?” she asks. “I tried to call you.”
You shake your head. “You have to leave me alone. I’m not who you think I am. I’m getting off in Dijon. I’m sorry for what happened to you. But I can’t help you.”
“Alice?” she asks. She makes a hard nodding motion with her head, which lolls forward so her chin hits her chest. Then she turns her neck to the side and her head rolls after, her ear to her shoulder. She looks up at you from the corner of her eye and says, “Let’s go.”
You turn and wrench open the dividing doors and stumble through into the next car. You run past door after narrow, steel door. The lights stutter overhead. You want to count the cars as you run, further and further away from your couchette, from your suitcase, from the dining car. You want a number trail to tell you how to get back. But the pound of your feet on the hard carpet pushes everything else out of your head and you only break stride to wrestle open each set of dividing doors. Your chest burns and your legs throb. You reach another bathroom door and feel a flooding urge to close yourself in, to wrap yourself safe in the machine. You stop and look back. Nothing but an empty corridor, steel grey wall mirrored in the windows onto the night. You’re breathing hard and you press your forehead against the plastic laminate, one palm and one fist full of papers up against the wall.
As your breath slows, you feel the shudder of the floor under you feet. You can no longer sense which way the train is heading. You push off the wall and your palm feels wet. You look up. Where your hand has been pressed is a streaked imprint in red. You close your eyes and ball your fist around the painless wet. That’s enough. You need to wash your hands.
You push open the door to the toilet and start. A man has his back to you. In the mirror, you see the face of the balding attendant you passed in the corridor before dinner. He has his indigo waistcoat unbuttoned and is leaning forward on the sink, sweeping green eye shadow over his lids. There is a copper blonde wig in a flattened heap on the counter. He meets your eyes in the mirror and looks back ahead, closes one eye and dusts the little brush across his skin. You back out, trying to pull the door closed. It won’t latch from the outside and your hand smears blood on the handle as you fumble. You push through the next pair of dividing doors and the corridor opens up onto the dining car. You groan. You can’t have reached here. You were running the other way.
In the dining car, the centre lights are off for the night. The place is lit only by a string of small downlights in the bulkheads over the windows. In the gloom, four attendants sit around a table at empty plates. Their hunched backs and pale faces are reflected in the windows, the opposing walls of black glass sending the table, the figures, the pale crockery extending out in flanks of repeated reflections. The rear of the car is lost in the dark and, to either side, those reflected cars stretch to eternity. The attendant sitting facing you looks up, meets your eyes, and it feels like it takes a fraction of a second before her reflections in the wings lift their own heads after.
You take a step back, your eyes on the table as the glass doors clamp shut in front of your face.
“Alex?”
You spin. The corridor is empty. From a couchette partway along comes the sound of something heavy dropping to the floor. You run to it, hear the latch slide closed. You batter your fist against the door. “Open up,” you shout. “What are you doing?” You look along the corridor and see the next door open a crack. “Wait!” you call. The door closes as you reach it.
You stride along the car, pounding on each door as you pass. You leave a spatter of blood with every fall of your fist. “Who’s in there? What do you want?” No one answers. Behind one door you hear panting, then silence. Behind another, muffled sobs. You need to find someone outside of this, someone who can tell you that you are on a train to Venice, that you will arrive in the morning to give your presentation. You move down, and after hammering on the last door of the car you stand with your feet apart, fist clenched. You hear muffled voices, or one voice, talking under its breath. You pound again, on the smear of blood you left the first time. The voice lifts: “Alice? Is that you? What’s the time?”
You stand back. “Come out. This is over.”
“What’s the time?” the voice asks again. The tone is exasperated, angry. You look at your watch—fourteen past ten—and hammer again on the door. “When are we stopping in Dijon?” you shout. “We should have stopped already. We should have been there by now.” Ten-one-four. Ten-oh-three. Nine-nine-two. You lose count.
The door opens and the attendant is standing inside, head cocked like before. All four bunks are set, mounded with tousled sheets spilled over with red. You grab her by the shoulder, keep your eyes locked on her sidelong face to stop yourself looking past her at the shapes under the sheets. You shake her as you hiss in her face: “Why didn’t we stop in Dijon?”
She looks up from her shoulder. “When you fall down, you just have to pick yourself up.”
Then, behind her, the window of the cabin shatters. The sound is a boom in the night, lights every nerve in your body like a fuse. The air in the cabin sucks out through the window and you stumble against her. She stands solid, her cocked head staring past, her shoulder forward into your weight. The air rushes past you, flurrying your hair. You push her away and stumble back into the corridor, continue away from the dining car. An explosion of glass starts beside you and tears down the length of the car as the corridor windows disintegrate. You lose the reflection that locked you into the train and the night opens up with a roar. You are at the dividing doors that should lead you back the way you came. You wrench them open with a slick, red hand, still clutching the sheaf of papers in the other, and step into an anteroom at the back of the car. There is no next carriage. Where there should have been the next doors and the corridor back to your things is a flat, black window out onto the night. Your reflection for a moment is a young woman with copper blonde hair. This, then, you think is how you find out. The glass goes with a scream, hanging for an instant as a network of shatter lines before the back of the train is open. Beyond the end of the car, in the light that spills out, the tracks flash past, either streaming out from or being dragged under the end of the train. You can’t tell. The wind pouring around you is a directionless chaos. Behind you, the doors are jerked open a crack. The attendant reaches her arm through the gap. They close across her elbow and she slams her body against the door alongside, her cocked face against th
e glass.
You watch the reaching arm, fingers opening and closing, as you stagger back against the windowsill. Turning, you lean out through the frame. The rhythmic thump of the wheels on the rails pounds in your ears like a frantic heart. The storm sucks at your clothes. You see rungs fixed into the rear of the car. You brace and lift a foot onto the ledge. Your fistful of papers flaps in the drag. The doors hiss open behind you, then crack back together over the attendant’s arm. You hear a thud.
You can’t climb while still holding the registration papers. You open your fist and they catch in the wind, are tossed up and around in a flutter of white before they are jerked into the darkness along the tracks. You don’t see where they land. Then, with the clamour of the night in your ears, you pull yourself up and lean out to grasp the nearest rung.
The climb is a push against the buffet of the storm. The rungs press sharp through the soles of your shoes. They are cold and thin in your hands and you think about them pulling loose with your weight, of you being jerked out into the night like a sheaf of papers. They hold. You reach the roof. The air here is a flood of cold in the icy light of the moon that glints off the dirty silver of the train car. From the centre of the roof protrudes a low, square mount. You crawl towards it, the car too narrow, the wind too strong, until you are kneeling, looking down at the slow spin of a ventilation fan turning under a grate. You must have cut yourself climbing through the broken glass; darkness seeps through the sleeve of your jacket, down along your forearm from your elbow. You lower yourself to sit facing the end of the train, your fingers hooked into the grate behind you against the pummel of the wind.
Out from under the fluorescents, the night is grey. A weak surround of light spills from the cars, lighting the slope of the ballast. Beyond that, everything is hazed over by silver moonlight that picks out shapes—flat fields and studded trees—but not texture, so everything is cold and smooth. You can’t see the moon through the press of glowing cloud.