Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Nanny’s Little Candle
The Security Light
Your Lucky Day
Babysitting
Picture Me
Soot
Dead Molly
The Black Forest Chair
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jeremy de Quidt
Copyright
For Lizzie, Jack, Alice, and Bea,
same lovely sailors,
same leaky sieve
The boy didn’t realize what he’d done at first, because the train was where the last train should have been—a little two-car diesel at the end of the platform at Parkside—and he’d run flat out to catch it.
Putting his feet up on the seat opposite and getting his breath back, he sat looking down the car at the long black line of windows and the strip lights reflected in the glass, and even then the penny didn’t drop. There were usually at least half a dozen other people on the last train, but the car was empty. It was just him.
There was enough charge left on his phone to call his dad to tell him he’d caught the train, so his dad could pick him up, and then the phone died. But that didn’t matter, because his dad would be at the station, and it was only three stops.
It dawned on him only slowly that something was wrong—a thought that there should have been a station by now began to rise up through his head, like a child tugging at his sleeve for attention, and he sat up in the seat. Cupping his hands to the window and blanking out the lights of the car, all he could see was dark, and that was what was wrong. Breath condensing against the cold glass, he rubbed it clear and looked again, but there was nothing to see. Only dark.
What started as suspicion became certainty as the train rolled on and no familiar lights drifted past the window—not the overpass across the road nor the floodlights of the gas station.
This wasn’t the right train.
He stuck his face to the glass and stared, trying to figure out where he was, but there were no clues, not one—no station, no sign, nothing. He desperately wanted the train to stop so he could get off, but it just kept on going. Fifteen minutes—twenty? He sat looking helplessly at the empty car and the dark mirrors of the windows while the sound of the diesel droned on, taking him he hadn’t a clue where.
At last, the train began to slow. For several minutes it crawled along as though on the point of stopping, but never actually did, and each time he thought it would, it began to pick up speed again. Finally the train juddered to a halt in the dark, and he didn’t even know whether it was at a station or not, because when he cupped his hands to the glass, there were only a few lights and a low concrete wall to be seen out of the window. But the light on the door button came on, and being off the train seemed a better deal than being on it. So, getting out of his seat, he stepped onto the cold, dark platform before he’d even really thought through whether that was a good idea or not.
As he heard the doors of the train close behind him, and the engine revving up and pulling away, leaving him in the dark and the cold, he wasn’t so sure it had been a good idea at all. There was no one else on the platform, but by then it was too late to do anything except watch the lights of the train disappear. When the sound of it couldn’t be heard anymore, there was no sound at all.
Just silence.
It didn’t even look like a real station. The slab concrete of the wall ran along the back of it and there was a little shelter with a bench, but nothing else—not a ticket office or a machine. Not even a sign to say where it was. He could see the ends of the platform sloping down to the tracks and three lamps on poles, but the light from them was thin and weak. There were no houses, no streetlights. So far as he could see, there wasn’t a road, not even steps down to one. It was just a platform, dark and still, in the middle of nowhere.
Pulling his coat around him, he tried laughing at the dumbness of what he’d done, but in the cold silence his laughter fell from his lips like a shot bird, and that made him feel more alone. Sitting down on the bench, he turned up his collar against the cold and wondered what on earth he was going to do.
He’d been sitting like that for a while before he noticed the light.
At first it was so small that he wasn’t sure what it was—just a tiny dot swinging to and fro. But as it came slowly nearer, grew larger, he realized it was a flashlight.
No, not a flashlight.
A lantern.
A glass lantern.
Someone carrying a lantern was walking along the railway tracks, out of the darkness, toward him.
He sat up, not quite sure what to make of this. But as the light came closer, came slowly up the slope of the platform’s end, any concerns he might have had evaporated as he saw that it was carried by an old man. The man held the lantern in one hand, and a shopping bag and a leash attached to a small dog in the other. He came unhurriedly along the platform and, stopping by the bench, looked down at the boy and then up and back along the platform in that vague, undecided way that small children and elderly people do. The little dog sniffed at the boy’s shoes.
The boy sat looking at the man—at the frayed collar and thumb-greased tie; the thin raincoat; the cheap, split plastic leatherette of the shopping bag; the worn shoes and the scruffy little gray dog. A bunch of dead leaves and withered flowers poked out of the top of the bag, and that didn’t seem quite right.
The boy grinned apologetically.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But could you tell me when the next train’s going to be? I got on the wrong one and I need to get on one going back the other way.”
The old man glanced down at him but didn’t say anything, and the boy wasn’t sure whether he’d heard or not, so he said it again, and this time the man turned his head and looked at him.
“It’s not a station,” he said brightly. “It’s a Permanent Way Post. You’re on a Permanent Way Post.”
He had an odd voice—singsong, and brittle like a reed. Without seeing the face, it could have been a man’s or a woman’s.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” said the boy.
The man looked back along the track and, lifting the hand that held the leash and the bag, he pointed at the rails.
“It’s what the railway workers use when they mend the tracks,” he said. “It’s not a station.”
“But the train stopped here,” the boy objected. “I got off it.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have done that,” the man laughed. “You shouldn’t have done that at all. I wouldn’t have come along if you hadn’t done that.”
The boy didn’t understand what the man meant by that either, but the man sat himself down on the bench next to him and smiled reassuringly, so he smiled back. Up close, the man’s clothes smelled of laundry detergent and old cloth—it was a homey smell, like cups of tea and corner shops. The man put the lantern on the ground between his feet. It lit his socks and his shoes and the grubby, gray coat of the little dog. The boy could see the man’s eyes now; they were watering in the cold night air. The man smiled again.
“If you’re stuck here,” he said. “Toby and me better keep you company. Least, until your train comes. We’ve got plenty of time, me and Toby.”
The little dog looked up and wagged his tail.
The boy pulled his coat tighter, pressed out the cold pockets of air, and folded his arms around himself to keep the warmth in.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Really, I’m fine—as long as I know there’s another train going to come.”
But as he said it, he looked along the empty platform and, if he was honest with himself, he thought he’d be glad of the company.
>
“Wouldn’t dream of leaving you,” said the old man. “Not now you’ve got off the train. Wouldn’t be right for me to leave you, would it?” He smiled and, bending forward, stroked the little dog’s ears.
The boy frowned. “It will stop, won’t it?” he asked, looking along the bare platform.
“Course it will,” the man said. “Just wave it down, and you’ll be all right.”
They sat quietly for a while. The man didn’t say anything; he sat looking into the dark at the end of the platform, tapping his shoes on the cold ground, one then the other, as though drumming a little tune to himself while he watched for the lights of the train. The boy began to think that things hadn’t worked out so badly. All he had to do was wait for the train. If he’d only been able to call his dad, he wouldn’t have minded at all.
He breathed out, making clouds with his breath, trying to pile one breath on top of the other.
The novelty of doing that was just beginning to wear thin when the man turned and looked at him.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” he said. “I’ll tell you a story while we wait for your train—help pass the time, a nice little story will. It’s a long time since I’ve told anyone one of my stories.”
“You don’t have to,” the boy said. “Really, I’m all right.”
But the man smiled, only this time it seemed he was smiling more to himself than to the boy.
“Got a little brother, do you?” he asked.
There was something so penetrating about the eyes that looked out of that old face that the boy didn’t need to answer.
“I thought so,” the man said. “I know a story about a girl and her baby brother. I’ll tell you that one if you like—help pass the time, it will.”
The boy shook his head resignedly.
“All right, then,” he said.
“Tickety-boo,” said the old man brightly, and sitting back on the bench, he took a quiet breath, and began.
It happened so seamlessly as the man spoke that the boy couldn’t say when the platform stopped and the small house started, but once it had happened, there wasn’t a platform around him anymore—there was only the sense of a summer sky, and green leaves, and a girl standing on a dirt path that led to a small house.
It was her mom’s idea to move. “New baby, new house,” she’d said.
But the baby wasn’t Cassie’s dad’s, and Cassie didn’t have a dad anymore, not since he’d found that out. So now it was just Cassie, and her mom and the new baby.
“It will be lovely,” her mom kept saying. “Everything you didn’t have in town, everything you’ve always wanted—big backyard, trees to climb. You can walk down the track and get the bus to the new school when you start in the autumn. It’ll be simple.”
But she was thirteen now. She’d wanted the trees and the backyard when she was eight, but not now. It was like her mom couldn’t see that. It wasn’t even going to be her old school. Everything had to be new—Mom’s new smile, Mom’s new plans, Mom’s new baby—everything.
Everything, that is, except the bungalow at the end of the path. There was nothing new about that. It was from the 1930s—bit of a backyard, bit of an orchard—all overgrown. When the old lady who’d lived there died, it just stood empty. Wasn’t even cleared of her things. After a year, it was put up for rent—a big red sign at the end of the path—that’s how Cassie’s mom found it.
It was falling down, but it was cheap. When they moved in, the old lady’s furniture was still there—not the beds and sheets, they’d all gone, but everything else: chairs, table, cracked bar of soap on the windowsill, old pages out of a Woman’s Weekly taped to the wall. Her TV guide pinned to one side of the kitchen mirror. There was even a calendar with her hospital appointments marked on it in pen.
It smelled damp. Felt damp.
“It won’t do, not once we’ve got the place all cleaned and aired,” her mom had said. She’d gone around singing a happy cleaning song like she was some princess in a film, opening the windows—the panes all dirty with old rain and dust. “Listen, Cassie,” she’d said as she’d stood by a window, and Cassie had listened. There was nothing, just birds singing and insects in the orchard. No street, no cars, no noise. Nothing of their old life at all.
“You see, love?” her mom had said, smiling. “You see?”
There was a cubbyhole kitchen with a couple of painted shelves and a two-ring gas stove, linoleum tiles on the floor. A rusty little key that didn’t fit anything hung knotted on a string in the pantry like it had been there forever.
Cassie’s room was at the back. From the window she could see the orchard thick with summer nettles and weeds. There were thirteen apple trees, and beyond them, at the edge of the open fields, a water tank and an old brick-and-plaster outbuilding with the roof all fallen in.
There was so much work, so much cleaning to do. The water and the electricity didn’t always work, though, and when they didn’t, her mom would call the renting agents on her cell phone, only there was barely enough signal to make herself heard and she’d just end up shouting at them.
Sometimes, after Cassie had gone to bed, she’d hear her mom calling “Michael,” whoever he was, and she’d end up shouting at him too.
And then there was the baby.
All those times her mom had told her and Dad that she’d been working late, well, it hadn’t always been work, had it?
Her mom had named the baby Niall, which sounded like the river. Cassie just called it “the baby.”
“His name’s Niall,” her mom would say. She wouldn’t give up trying to get Cassie to say his name, but it wasn’t something Cassie wanted to do. If it hadn’t been for it, things wouldn’t have changed, would they? She’d have been back in the old house with her mom and her dad, and it would have been just the three of them like it always had.
But it wasn’t.
She didn’t even want to hold the baby. Just thinking about her mom holding it made her feel physically sick.
“Go on, you have a go,” her mom would say, but Cassie wouldn’t take him. Her mom would rub her own face against the baby’s soft, downy black hair and say, “He smells like cookies and vanilla. Go on, you’ll like it when you do.” But Cassie didn’t want to, and finally her mom would turn away and stand by the open back door holding the baby and looking out at the thick nettles and the weeds in the orchard, and Cassie almost didn’t care if she was crying or not, because the baby cried enough for both of them.
He hardly ever stopped—at least that’s what Cassie thought.
Not that what she thought seemed to matter to anyone anymore. She couldn’t even talk to her old friends about any of it, because the cell signal was so crap.
So she made do the best she could: lying on her bed listening to her music, to Niall crying, to her mom trying to pretend that everything was princess-land wonderful.
And then Cassie found the little wooden box.
It was in the old outbuilding. She’d gotten to it across the orchard, cutting her way through the tall nettles with a stick. The plaster on the walls was rust stained and blooming with yellow mold, and there was a big metal pot filled with a mush of wet leaves that stank when she stirred them. The ground was covered with broken roof tiles and twigs and pigeon droppings, but in one corner was a wooden box—not much bigger than a shoe box. The wood was warped and weather-stained and there was a little brass key plate on the front. It was locked tight. But the box rattled when she shook it, so there had to be something inside. She took it back through the nettles.
“There won’t be anything worth having,” her mom said as Cassie tried the kitchen drawers for a screwdriver to pry it open. “It’s probably just old tools.”
But Cassie didn’t care.
Only she couldn’t find a screwdriver.
As if someone had whispered the idea into her head, she suddenly remembered the rusty little key on the string in the pantry.
That would be about the right size. She pulled it
off its string and tried it in the lock.
Bingo.
With a little bit of careful effort, it turned.
She couldn’t believe her disappointment. There were four old candles in the box, that was all. They were wrapped in yellowed wax paper—three white ones and a black one. The black one was dirty and greasy. Cassie had to wipe her fingers clean on her top after she’d touched it.
“I said it wouldn’t be anything worthwhile,” said her mom, standing there, Niall on her hip.
“I think they’re good,” said Cassie, but she didn’t know why she’d said that, because they weren’t good at all. She could still feel the greasiness of the black candle on the tips of her fingers. But when her mom said to put them back outside where she’d found them, Cassie didn’t want to. They were hers now. She put them on the old lady’s dressing table that was in her room.
They were still there when she went to bed.
It wasn’t that she’d meant to light them, and if she’d had any batteries left in her flashlight when she went to bed, she wouldn’t have done. But when the electricity went off that night after dinner, they were the only candles they had. Rather than go to bed in the dark, Cassie stood the four candles in a plate of water on the dresser and lit them with a match. First the white ones and then, the last of the match almost burning her fingers, she lit the black.
She lay in her bed watching as the flickering shadows crept upward and forward across the wall. Her mom had gone to bed. Through the thin walls she could hear the sound of Niall crying and her mom shushing and singing little songs to him, like she used to do for Cassie when she cried.
Only her mom didn’t do that for her anymore.
Cassie punched her pillow flat, and with the candles still burning and the shadows reaching out across the walls, she put her earbuds in, turned her music up to drown out the sound of the baby, and closed her eyes.
She let the words and the music wash over her. The sheets were cool and her body felt long and still. She lay there all quiet with the music in her head. But there was a whispering line in one of the songs she’d never noticed before. Someone was speaking along to the music, only it didn’t fit the song. It was reedy, like an old woman’s voice.
The Wrong Train Page 1